About
Emerging climate feedbacks
More heatwaves in oceans, intensifying droughts on continents, thawing permafrost, melting icecaps. Consequences of climate change have begun emerging worldwide in the oceans, ice, land, and atmosphere.
Complex feedbacks in Earth’s climate system, triggered by ongoing CO2 emissions and warming, can influence global warming potentially much further. While the impacts of these feedbacks are expected to be relatively minor over the coming years to decades, they will determine the future of Earth’s climate far beyond 2100.
However, even in today’s best climate models, scientific understanding of these feedbacks remains highly uncertain. This uncertainty risks underestimating sea level rise, the extremity of disruptive heatwaves, or spending huge resources on ineffective climate action plans.
Bridging the gap
At EMBRACER, we bring together a wide range of world-leading climate experts. Earth scientists, geochemists, oceanographers, polar researchers, hydrologists and ecologists collaborate to bridge the knowledge gap between predicting short-term and long-term climate change.
We work at the very frontiers of knowledge on climate change, Earth’s climate system and climate feedbacks, while enabling junior researchers’ professional and leadership development, and fostering long term excellence and diversity in our field. Due to its interdisciplinary approach to connect different earth systems components, timescales and methods, EMBRACER is uniquely positioned to study climate change and feedbacks mechanisms of great importance to timescales of decades to millennia.
EMBRACER is a 10-year research programme funded by the Summit grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO.