Along with the accelerated warming of both polar regions over recent decades, the melting of the ice sheets and sea ice in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres has attracted ample scientific attention, given their global impacts. Yet, the understanding of (i) how ice sheets, continental snow cover, permafrost and boreal forests (taken together hereafter as ‘land surface’) – key players in the hydrological and carbon cycles – respond to climate change and (ii) the interactions between the high latitude land surface and the rest of the ice-ocean-atmosphere coupled system remains limited. A better prediction of future decadal-scale variations requires a more thorough understanding of drivers and mechanisms of past decadal-scale climate variability, which can bridge discrepancies between climate models and observations using a combination of in-situ, satellite, climate proxy and modeling approaches including data assimilation. In this session we invite submissions studying the impact of drivers of polar climate and land surface on various timescales including both numerical modeling studies and observation-focused works of past climate change (historical and paleoclimate). We also welcome works studying the role of tropical-polar two-way interactions in polar climate change across seasons, focusing on the relationship of the high latitude land surface to the other components of the Earth system and lower latitudes (such as the interactions between the tropics, Southern Ocean and Antarctica or the Greenland ice sheet).