The culmination of five years of work by three working groups comprising hundreds of scientists around the world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment was released in parts throughout this year. A newly released synthesis presents their findings in one document. Sea levels are on average 7.5 inches higher than in 1900; surface temperatures are 1.5°F higher than in 1880; “the period from 1983 to 2012 was very likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 800 years in the Northern Hemisphere,” write the authors. These changes will have significant impacts on societies, including reducing water availability, affecting food security, making urban areas more vulnerable, exacerbating health problems, and making poverty reduction more difficult. The conclusion of the Fifth Assessment Report comes at a critical time as hopes are high for a global climate treaty to emerge from the UN climate conference in Paris next year.

Following the release of its first climate roadmap last month, the U.S. military released a much larger report on efforts to reach mitigation goals mandated by a series of executive orders since 2009. “The objective of the [Department of Defense] Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan is for sustainability to become thoroughly woven into the everyday fabric of the DOD mission,” reads the introduction. Frank Kendall, under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, reports the use of petroleum-based fuels has declined, use of renewables has increased, water efficiency has improved, and greenhouse gas emissions have declined. Many of these improvements are incremental – greenhouse gas emissions, for example, declined by just one percent compared to last year – and they do not cover resources used on the battlefield, but the trends are in the right direction and the report makes clear the scale of the Pentagon’s efforts.