Climate change is moving incredibly fast but could accelerate further due to feedback mechanisms, such as additional CO2 emissions from thawing permafrost. A broad consortium with leading climate experts, called EMBRACER, will bridge the knowledge gap between predicting short-term and long-term climate change. It was announced today that the Dutch Research Council (NWO) is awarding a Summit grant of 30 million to this 10-year research project.
EMBRACER, which stands for Earth systeM feedBack ReseArch CEntRe, is a consortium of Utrecht University, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Radboud University Nijmegen and Wageningen University & Research (WUR).
'In the short term, until the middle of this century, we have a good picture of how climate change is taking place,' says Appy Sluijs, professor of Paleoceanography at Utrecht University. 'But important feedback mechanisms work slowly and their full impact will only become visible in the coming decades to centuries. Even with rigorous climate action, they will determine Earth's climate well beyond 2100. So far, however, we lack the scientific understanding to anticipate their impact. So with EMBRACER, we are really taking the next step.'
The future of tropical forests
WUR scientists are researching the fate of tropical forests within EMBRACRER. These are threatened by climate change and deforestation, even to surrounding peatlands such as the Pantanal in the Amazon. Higher temperatures and longer droughts make trees vulnerable and drain the peatlands. 'We thus run the risk that tropical forests will start emitting net CO2 and thus exacerbate climate change, whereas until now they did just the opposite,' says Wouter Peters, professor of carbon cycle at WUR.
An increase in the number of forest fires, WUR professor Guido van der Werf's field, may also play an important role in this. Together with other researchers within the consortium, they will measure CO2 fluxes in the atmosphere, forests and rivers to investigate the risk of many tropical forests disappearing, and to better understand what feedbacks to our climate this ultimately creates.
Bridging the gap
Within EMBRACER, 23 top Dutch researchers from a very wide range of climate sciences work together: from earth scientists and geochemists to oceanographers, climatologists, polar researchers, hydrologists and ecologists. Thanks to this interdisciplinary approach and connecting research methods and time scales, EMBRACER bridges the gap between predicting short-term and long-term climate change. That such a thing is needed is shown by the fact that even the best future projections still take little account of feedback mechanisms that are of great importance on time scales of decades to millennia.
'But those future projections are the basis of climate policy,' warns Sluijs. 'Which means we may now be vastly underestimating sea level rise or warming in the second half of this century.'
About the Summit grant
The EMBRACER project is one of five collaborations supported within NWO's prestigious Summit programme. The Summit grant is intended for research consortia that have proven in existing collaborations that they belong to the absolute world top or are very close to this and can make the leap to the absolute world top with this instrument.
The awarded projects have proven their worth in recent years by contributing to essential insights in their own field of science. The teams will now have the peace and space to develop further and make an important contribution to new knowledge for society. A new generation of researchers can also be trained so that knowledge and research can be continued in the longer term.
