Understanding what drives human migration in floodplains is critical for mitigating risks and enhancing resilience to floods. However, existing global analyses have not fully explored these complex dynamics. Here we introduce a metric, human-flood distance change, to track migration in floodplains from 2000 to 2018, exploring the interplay of climatic and anthropogenic influences. We find that in developing countries, including India, Argentina, Brazil and Nigeria, flood fatalities and displacement strongly influence migration decisions, often forcing populations to move away or toward flood-prone areas due to flood damage memory or resource needs. Conversely, regions with higher flood protection, such as the United States, show migration trends away from hazardous areas. Climatic drivers, like flood inundation area, exert stronger influences in Australia. Notably, in the Philippines and Kenya, the easing of drought-flood abrupt alternation has led to increased population movement toward flood-prone areas, underscoring the complex interactions between multiple hazards.

Droughts frequently occur in Yunnan province, the southwest of China, which leads to crop loss, ecosystem degradation, and difficulties in drinking water for people. In order to assess and compare the extremeness for different drought events, this study quantified it by utilizing the joint return period of drought multi-characteristics. Three characteristics at the regional scale: drought duration, severity, and affected areas were obtained by a simple regional drought process methodology, and their relationship was considered based on three types of Archimedean Copulas. Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index at a six-month time scale was selected as the optimal drought index based on actual drought impact data. Results showed that drought events in Yunnan province were mostly short drought duration, low severity, and high drought-affected areas. By comparing the historical reported droughts’ loss, the return periods of drought events calculated by the combination of duration and severity and drought-affected area are much more suitable to reflect the real drought situations than those calculated by one- or two-dimensional drought characteristics, especially for extreme drought events. On average, the drought in Yunnan province was almost shown a return period of ~10 yr. The frequency of droughts in Yunnan province has gradually increased due to climate change, and droughts with ~100 yr or even larger return periods occurred in 2009–2010 and 2011–2013.

The Central Asian region is subject to frequent seasonal floods, resulting in substantial losses. These recurrent floods have induced certain changes in human flood adaptation characteristics in Central Asia, an area that is currently under-researched. This study, grounded in meticulously simulated flood inundation outcomes, multisource population distribution data, and flood protection infrastructure data, introduces an improved approach to calculating the distance between human and flood (HFD) and investigates human flood adaptation characteristics in Central Asia. Our findings indicate that residents in Central Asia get close to flood-prone areas from 1970 to 2007, with the exceptions of Turkmenistan (TKM) and Kyrgyzstan (KGZ). Notably, this trend is particularly pronounced in regions such as Xinjiang, China, and Tajikistan (TJK). An intricate exponential increase is observed in the population exposed to floods as the HFD decreases. Under future scenarios, KGZ exhibits the most significant trend of staying away from flood-prone areas, while TJK presents the opposite trend, and TKM experiences minimal changes. Additionally, compared with urban areas, rural areas of Central Asia exhibit a trend towards approaching floods. This study underscores the optimum nature of human flood adaptation when the HFD reaches 4.23 km, showing the potential for substantial benefits by implementing population evacuation within this threshold buffer zone. These insights highlight the complex interplay between human behaviours and floods and can inform the formulation of effective flood risk mitigation strategies.

Fire regulates the carbon, water and nutrient cycles, especially in regions with distinct wet and dry seasons. The dramatic vegetation response to climatic factors complicates fire preconditions in Eurasian drylands, leaving our understanding of climate-fuel-fire patterns limited. Here we identify eight pyromes with unique combinations of fire characteristics of size, expansion, frequency and duration. We find these pyromes are geographically contiguous and exhibit varied response to climate, fuel load, fuel flammability and human activities. Fuel load is closely related to fast-spreading fires in Eurasian Steppe, which mostly belongs to the large-fast-frequent-long (LFFL) and medium-fast-intermediate-short (MFIS) pyromes. There, antecedent fine fuel accumulation during the growing season dries out in the subsequent dry season, is ignited by human activity and spreads rapidly. High-latitude regions are dominated by slow-spreading but long-lasting fires (large-slow-rare-long (LSRL) and medium-slow-intermediate-long (MSIL) pyromes), where changes in fuel flammability due to long-term climate stress determine fire extent. These findings provide initial guidance of which controls should be considered for improving predictions of fire activity and fire risk assessment across Eurasian drylands.

Understanding how fires impact the carbon cycle is crucial for developing effective climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Although there is a substantial global body of research on fire carbon cycle (FCC), there are relatively few studies offering graphical and quantitative analyses. To assess the trends in FCC research from 1989 to 2023, we performed a bibliometric analysis using the Science Citation Index—Expanded database. A total of 2408 publications were analyzed in this study. The results revealed that from 1989 to 2023, the quantity of publications in the field of FCC studies increased significantly. However, the average number of citations per paper per year first increased rapidly, followed by a slow increase, and then a decline. The top 10 institutions contributing to FCC research were predominantly based in the United States and the United Kingdom, with these countries also leading in the number of publications and citations. Beyond the keywords “fire” and “carbon” used in collecting literature, “climate-change” and “dynamic” were the top two most prominent research focuses. The topic of research has shifted from 1989 to 2023. Climate, vegetation, and emissions were the basic themes, which were important but not well developed, and will be the focus of future research. Along with climate change, research will focus more and more on fire emissions and modeling.