Soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics play a major role in determining soil fertility, atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate change adaptation. However, the relationship between soil C persitance and vulnerability under increasing atmospheric temperature and growing global population is poorly understood. Therefore better constraints on SOM pools and fluxes and their reaction to global change are required allowing to disentangle soil C persistence and vulnerability. This session focuses on empirical and modeling studies of soil carbon and its response to warming, and ecosystem vulnerability in different soil types. Contributions focusing on organic as well as mineral soils in contrasting climatic regions are welcome. They may include interdisciplinary research from experiments and observation networks collecting long term, geographically distributed data. International efforts working towards soil data harmonization and data-model sharing are also featured.