Global climate change has resulted in various transformations, including changes in temperature, precipitation, land productivity, water resources, natural hazards, and atmospheric chemistry. These changes have significant impacts on ecosystem functions and services, particularly in critical regions (e.g. mountains, deserts, coasts, and Arctic areas). These environments have experienced more intense warming and higher frequencies of extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, and wind storms, compared to the global average. In this regard, the comparison between paleo and recent data inside the same environments can provide better reconstructions of past variations and more reliable comparisons with current scenarios, opening the way to the use of previously overlooked archives.
This session will focus on the investigation of new indicators to characterize and understand meteorological, hydrological, and bio-geochemical processes in these critically endangered areas. Specific topics of interest include:
● Changes in mean climate, but also variability, frequency, and intensity of extreme events for the main climatological variables (e.g. precipitation, temperature, snow depth) to identify impacts on the ecological and hydrological systems.
● The effects of climate change on surface gas fluxes and in particular on carbon cycling.
● Feedback mechanisms between the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the soil, including the effects of changes in land use and land cover.
● Adaptation strategies and management practices that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change in extreme environments.
● Comparisons between proxy data from natural archives before and during the last 150 years and the introduction of instrumental measurements.
This session aims also at identifying the key research gaps and provide recommendations for future research to better understand and manage the effects of climate change in critical environments.