In response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change, we are transitioning towards a climate state that may feature rapid changes. This will have severe impacts on the occurrence of extreme weather events and increasing risk of crossing large-scale tipping points. Neither these transitions nor long-term climate states have been observed by instrumental measurements, making information on past climatic states increasingly important to anticipate future Earth System change. The availability of paleoenvironmental records have enormously expanded over the past decades, providing extremely rich information about physical, cryospheric, biological, and ecological processes on many spatial and temporal scales. Yet, it has been challenging so far to directly transform knowledge on past processes into a more confident evaluation of future projections for the Earth system.
Being able to reconstruct past climate evolution is a necessary step for enhancing our capacity to look into the future. Incorporating palaeodata-based information on past climate requires substantial improvements to state-of-the-art Earth System Models (ESMs). So far, ESMs are mainly calibrated and validated with respect to the instrumental records of the last ~170 years of relatively stable climate, while the Earth’s longer-term history is characterised by an interplay of gradual climate change, variability, and critical transitions between competing states, with profound impacts on climate subsystems, ecosystems, and civilisations.
Understanding the leading dynamical processes and feedbacks and in particular improving our ability to model and anticipate critical transitions in the climate and ecosystems is key to project future climate change on spatio-temporal scales relevant for societies, ecosystems, and the planet.

We invite contributions that
- advance process understanding of past climate changes and enhance ESM development through high resolution reconstructions of five key climate system parameters: atmospheric CO2-concentration, ice sheet (sea level) and sea ice extent, ocean temperatures, and terrestrial vegetation;
- explore modern approaches to incorporate palaeoclimate information into the development of ESMs of varying complexity, including rigorous model-data comparison techniques;
- make use of information from paleoenvironmental proxy data, past civilisations, ESMs, and rigorous theoretical approaches - individually or in combination.