The European Green Deal, first announced in December 2019, sets ambitious targets, including reaching climate neutrality in Europe by 2050; addressing the drivers of biodiversity loss in Europe; restoring degraded ecosystems; and adopting a zero-pollution action plan for air, water and soils. Achieving these bold targets will require scientific expertise from many different geoscience areas.

This Union Symposium will provide participants with an introduction to the European Green Deal, highlighting aspects that require geoscience expertise and discussing how scientists can engage with, and effectively support, the Deal’s ambitious targets. The session will also discuss the different stages of development and implementation of the Green Deal’s targets, what’s coming next and where science can be integrated. As a European scientific union focusing on many aspects relating to the Green Deal, the EGU is well positioned to highlight these areas through this session and beyond.

The panel will include scientists working in areas related to the Green Deal and policymakers who either initially proposed the Green Deal roadmap or who are currently working on its implementation. The session will include presentations from these speakers as well as a moderated discussion on how geoscientists can best support the Green Deal’s targets and a Q&A with the audience. Despite being a European specific initiative, the Green Deal also outlines missions working with neighbouring countries to the EU and some countries in Africa. In addition, many countries outside of the EU have discussed similar strategies. This session will therefore be of interest to a broader international audience.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a major trauma for humanity and naturally calls for multiple scientifically-based responses to mitigate the risks and build resilience to it and its potential successors. It should be stressed that the geosciences communities have already strived to respond to it, drawing on their expertise, even if they have also had to face various upheavals as a result of the pandemic.
The solicited talks of this Union Session will highlight these contributions but, more importantly, will seek to identify new developments. These include a better understanding of zoonotic spillovers, anomalous mechanisms and pathways of multi-scale transmission, the role of natural and man-made environmental complexity.
These developments are expected to greatly improve monitoring and governance of the epidemic at different scales and strengthen community engagement. Overall, they put geosciences into a post-Covid perspective.

In 2020, humanity faced up to an urgent and deadly challenge. The COVID-19 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread rapidly and with shocking impacts, tragically claiming (at the time of writing) hundreds of thousands of lives.

Rapid and dramatic action was called for and – thankfully – was largely forthcoming, from governments, businesses and individuals.

Across the globe, drastic lifestyle changes were imposed, with freedoms curtailed and life for many stripped back to the necessities, and yet these changes were generally accepted. Welcomed even. They were to keep us safe. To protect us now and into the future.

The contrast with the Climate Emergency is fascinating. It too is an urgent and deadly existential challenge, and yet the consensus is that actions are too little, too slow, the urgency is lacking, the public buy-in largely absent.

Despite growing awareness over many decades, there is no effective, concerted programme to address this largest of all global problems.

It appears likely that any reduction in carbon emissions as a result of lifestyle changes to contain the spread of the Coronavirus will be only temporary. Furthermore, financial initiatives to help economies restart and other initiatives to prevent the spread of the disease, such as reduced use of public transport and a huge escalation in the use of single use plastics, are likely to bring increased environmental harm.

This Union session looks at the Climate and Ecological Emergency through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis, and asks, what lessons can we learn? How can some of that urgency be brought to this greatest existential challenge? Can lifestyle changes implemented during the crisis which bring positive outcomes for our future sustainability be maintained and enhanced? And can those which are increasing harm be turned around? In short, can this terrible global crisis serve as a wakeup call for action to protect all our futures?

This Union Symposium invites a broad range of thinkers and influencers, ranging from leading climate scientists to broadcasters, policymakers and influencers to provide their perspectives on how the COVID-19 crisis can help inform actions to address our generation’s greatest challenge.

As geoscientists, we watch over the health of our planet, we see the changes, we understand the impacts. We know the likely consequences of inaction. Our community has a vital role to play.

The terrestrial biosphere exerts disproportionate influence on Earth's climate, making improvements in its representation key to reducing climate uncertainty. After 50 years of development, land surface models contain detailed processes of energy fluxes, photosynthesis, hydrology, C-N-P cycles, and land-use within coarse non-interacting grid cells. Remaining discrepancies in fidelity to observed carbon and water cycles appear primarily related to deficiencies in the representation of forests and human activity. These include the omission of spatial processes of disturbance, migration, adaptation, and management. Also missing is the generative process of life, evolution, which gives rise to life history strategies, trophic-metabolic networks, leaf economics, local adaptation (i.e., optimality, acclimation), and plant behaviour. Despite improvements in representing vegetation demography by utilizing emergent properties of allometric scaling, canopy geometric realism remains low. This may bias carbon and water cycles per radiative transfer and coupled processes of photosynthesis, regeneration, evapotranspiration, heterotrophic respiration, and disturbance.

We believe that physics-based botanical models, forest landscape models, and terrestrial biosphere models may soon merge into new multi-scale models. While low-dimensional representations of forests are often used to improve computational efficiency and cope with a dearth of 4-D forest observatories, deep learning may be combined with new autonomous scanning systems - proximal and/or remote - such as our proposed global tower-based '5DNet' to infer evolvable 4-D physics-based models. This includes learning multi-generation tree models with 4-D traits from image and/or laser scanning time-series. To date, 4-D ontogeny has been inferred from individual scans of mature trees, multi-plant phenological events have been tracked in real-time, and the self-similar and -organizing nature of plants has been used to efficiently compress tree models down to their generating parameters. Achieving leaf-to-global scaling may require co-processor acceleration and fusing deep learning with 3-D radiative transfer modeling to infer global surface properties. An additional focus on evolution and human activity comes as 21st century land surface models mature into general simulations of life on Earth.

This Union Symposium presents exciting work toward achieving this moonshot in Earth observation and systems modeling.

Patience Cowie revolutionised our understanding of the growth and interaction of faults, and the impact these have on the topography of extensional settings. Through her tenacious focus on the science, infectious enthusiasm, wonderful sense of humour and commitment to women in science, she inspired a generation of young researchers, many of whom are presenting in this Union Symposium.
Patience’s early research began with the growth and interaction of faults and their length/displacement scaling. She studied faults at different scales, from small scale, linking damage zone to displacement, to whole fault systems, demonstrating how the development of complex fault networks impacts fault slip rate. She built numerical models of fault interactions that integrated the response of river systems to the changing topography. The predictions of these models challenged geomorphological and stratigraphic understanding of extensional settings, and resulted in a wealth of research on the extraction of tectonic signals from river profiles, and the sedimentological record of these processes.
This Union Symposium aims to sustain the momentum of Patience Cowie’s multidisciplinary approach to tackling fundamental questions concerning the interactions between the brittle upper crust and the surface processes that govern much of Earth’s topography. We are now addressing the physical mechanisms that can lead to the variety of slip styles and frictional behaviour on faults; this is critical to forecasting seismic hazard. As faults propagate, they determine the geometry of river networks, the distribution of erosion and the response time of river channels. These interactions govern sediment routing systems and the stratigraphic record of these processes. This symposium seeks to explore a future vision for the science underpinned by the fundamental processes linking faults and topography, balanced by an awareness of the societal challenges of risk management to natural hazards in these settings.