New EU-HORIZON project Past to Future (P2F) set to start in 2025

Responding to a call within the EU-HORIZON program “Climate Science and Responses”, a European consortium led by IMAU's Anna von der Heydt and Lucas Lourens of UU's Faculty of Geosciences has received funding for a four-year project called Past to Future (P2F): Towards fully palaeo-informed climate projections. Twenty-one European partners together with three associated partners form Switzerland, the US and Australia, covering a broad range of fields from mathematics, physics, geology, (palaeo-)biology and archaeology, will join forces. The common goal is to make optimal use of past climatic information to better understand Earth’s climate response to various kinds of forcing, with a focus on abrupt climate transitions and tipping points. 

Today's tools of choice to project future climate are Earth System Models (ESMs). These models are mainly calibrated and evaluated with respect to the instrumental records of the last ~170 years of relatively stable climate. Or hypothesis is that ESMs can only be significantly further improved when tested on robust reconstructions of past climates. Further back in time, Earth’s climate history is characterized by an interplay of gradual climate change interspersed with rapid, critical transitions between competing states, with profound impacts on climate subsystems, ecosystems, and civilizations. P2F will integrate the information from paleoenvironmental and archaeological proxy data and rigorous theoretical approaches with ESMs to understand the leading dynamical processes and feedbacks. The main aim is to improve our ability to anticipate critical climate and ecosystem transitions, so as to better anticipate the main climatic and societal impacts of the ongoing climate crisis. 

At IMAU, P2F research involves theoretical approaches to quantify climate responses to different forcings, advancing ice sheet and sea-level modelling and participating in a proof-of-concept to ‘recalibrate’ one ESM (CESM in collaboration with NCAR) using data from two distinct historical climate periods. At the Faculty of Geosciences, P2F will develop various proxy data collections. For easier access, a dynamic data portal will be developed, linking new and existing proxy data, highlighting different time spans, temporal resolutions, time scales of variability and proxy uncertainty of the underlying datasets. This will facilitate model-to-data comparisons, while ensuring that data are fit for purpose and easily accessible for the wider community.

UU will coordinate the extensive dissemination and outreach program and house the project management. Set to begin on March 1, 2025, the P2F project is expected to establish productive synergies with the concurrently starting EMBRACER project.

Anna von der Heydt