Palaeoclimate science for a better understanding of Earth system dynamics

This Destination contributes directly to the Strategic Plan’s Key Strategic Orientations ‘Green transition’, ‘Digital transition’ and ‘A more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe’.

In line with the Strategic Plan, the overall expected impact of this Destination is to contribute to the “Advancing science for a transition to a climate-neutral and resilient society”.

Expected impacts:

Research should contribute to closing major knowledge gaps on the changing climate together with their associated impacts and risks, on both society and nature. It should also help develop tools to support decision-makers in designing and implementing effective mitigation and adaptation actions at various time and spatial scales while properly accounting for synergies and trade-offs with other policy objectives, such as just transition, territorial cohesion and leaving no one behind.

The main impacts to be generated by topics under this Destination are:

1. Supporting climate action (both mitigation and adaptation) in Europe and globally, through advancing climate science and the knowledge base underpinning actionable solutions, to accelerate the transition to a climate-neutral, climate-resilient and prosperous society.
2. Closing key knowledge gaps related to climate change, thereby contributing substantially to key European and international assessments such as IPCC, IPBES, EUCRA, and other initiatives such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) under the World Climate Research Programme.
3. Strengthening the European Research Area on climate change by boosting scientific excellence and capacity in an inclusive manner across the participating countries.
4. Maximising synergies between mitigation and adaptation and with other policy priorities such as biodiversity and ecosystem preservation and restoration, disaster-preparedness, digitalisation, circular economy, prosperity and competitiveness, strategic autonomy, security and resilience, just transition, and the Sustainable Development Goals by exploring co-benefits, trade-offs and potential unintended consequences of climate strategies and policy interventions.

Important components of climate science research are also addressed in other Clusters -particularly Cluster 6 – which addresses the climate-ocean-cryosphere-polar nexus and the climate-energy-land-food-water-biodiversity nexus. Efforts to foster synergies and complementarities across these research activities are strongly encouraged.

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to some of the following outcomes:

• Better process understanding of past climate changes at different time scales, their variability and interactions with ecosystems, leading to improved Earth system models;
• Future climate change scenarios produced in light of past changes in the Earth system, in particular warm climates/high sea-level situations, and abrupt transitions;
• Identification of thresholds in Earth system components and better characterisation of driving mechanisms and feedbacks that may be responsible for non-linear behaviours, including indicators of abrupt changes, and early warning signals within palaeoclimate records;
• Synthesis of climate variations that can serve as fundamental basis for IPCC assessments and benchmarks for model inter-comparisons.

Scope:

Palaeoclimatic (including geological, biological and ice-core) records provide information on the long-term evolution of the climate, as well as the conditions and processes that can drive physical and ecological systems during warm and cold periods, deglaciations and abrupt climatic events. The challenge of the research under this topic is to provide robust information on palaeoclimate states and events outside the range of variability recorded over the past centuries that can serve as guide for the development of Earth system models.

This challenge will be tackled through some of the following activities:

• Producing and aggregating in databases high-resolution, well-dated, interoperable palaeoclimatic records on climate variability in terms of amplitude, time (onset, duration, frequency) and space (location, extension), extending the instrumental time series to improve our understating of the proxy records and the quantification of their uncertainties;
• Development of Earth system models with outputs that allow a more direct comparison to palaeo data, modelling climate variability, thresholds, and impacts across timescales from years to millennia;
• Describing short- to long-term climate evolution and the natural climate variability using quantitative reconstructions from different proxies of past climate periods;
• Identification of climate-related (including ecological) tipping points and their consequences using palaeo data and model experiments.
• Allowing for consistent integration of large-scale and more regional/local factors to be reproduced by climate models using natural forcings.

Projects should rely on palaeoclimatic data from scientific drilling or coring campaigns, sediment records, dendrochronological and other appropriate sources.

Projects funded under this topic are strongly encouraged to collaborate and envisage clustering activities together and with other relevant projects in and outside of Horizon Europe.