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Earth system models for the future

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ESM2025 (Earth system models for the future)

Période du rapport: 2021-06-01 au 2023-07-31

The goal of the ESM2025 project is to advance the understanding of the Earth System and its response to human activities.

To achieve this goal the project aims to develop the novel generation of European Earth System Models (ESMs) including a more comprehensive representation of the Earth’s response to anthropogenic emissions and human land-use change.

The improved models will help to enhance the consistency of climate and mitigation-relevant processes across ESMs and Integrated Assessment models (IAMs) and provide valuable scientific insights to support successful implementation of the Paris Agreement.

This project started on June 1st 2021 and this report highlights the progress made over the first 2 years of its implementation.
During the first 2 years of the project, the interdisciplinary consortium has achieved substantial advances on key physical, biogeochemical, biophysical, and aerosol processes to increase the realism of atmosphere, land, ocean, and cryosphere modelling within ESMs. Modelling groups have, in particular, made great progress with the inclusion on interactive tropospheric chemistry in atmosphere models. This development represents a step-change in the capacity of ESMs to represent coupling and interactions between climate and non-carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouses gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide in a comprehensive framework. In addition, two modelling platform have started integration of dynamical ice sheets in order to improve sea-level rise projections and climate-ice sheets interactions.

This key achievement has thus support key project objectives, that is the enhancement of the coupling between existing and new ESM components for carbon, methane, reactive nitrogen, nitrous oxide, and ice sheets, to capture the full range of climate-relevant interactions across the Earth system.

This report presents the progress of the work packages (WPs) during the first reporting period, in particular of those planned to be concluded (WPs 4, 6, 8 and 11).

This report will shine light on these progresses made within the WPs 4, 6 and 8, which respectively focused on the representation of interactive methane, nitrous oxide cycles, as well as dynamical ice sheets within ESMs.

Together with the development of ESMs, the project aims to improve quantification of climate and Earth system feedbacks, explore novel modelling approaches, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and develop new interdisciplinary frameworks that unifies the representation of climate and land-use change interactions across ESMs and IAMs.

In this context, this report will highlight progresses made within the WP 11 that has supported the development of the open-source version of the climate emulator MAGICC, which is widely employed as the climate component of IPCC-Class IAMs or in climate policy.
The ESM2025 project aims to develop novel models and tools to project future climate change and its impacts more accurately and integrated models to identify robust responses, contributing to the evidence base for important assessments by the IPCC, IPBES and UNEP.
The work carried out over the first 2 years of the project implementation has brought us closer to this goal.

In particular, the preliminary version of the new ESMs suggest that they will capable of providing more reliable information on the impact of different CO2-based and non-CO2-based mitigation strategies and their co-benefits for air quality and food security.

The ESM2025 project has also taken the role of the cross-community forum to improve linkage between Earth system modelling and Integrated assessment modelling, and more generally speaking between the research community of the IPCC Working Group I (climate science) and Working Group III (scenario and mitigation pathways). Through this original research angle, ESM025 has supported key research and development with the ultimate goal of improving the representation of land-use and land-based mitigation strategies in ESMs and IAMs, improving the tools for climate projections and analysis related to these topics.

In order to foster broader understanding of the science of climate change and possible solutions, ESM2025 has developed a broad range of events from science-to-policy partnership to support the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change to innovative climate education opportunities and communication resources for European students and citizens.

This report highlights the actions taken with project stakeholders communities across the first two years of the project implementation (including the most up-to-date version of the PEDR). `
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