Northern Peatlands in the face of climate warming and abrupt changes

Objective

CLIMPEAT aims to transform our understanding and ability to quantify the response of northern peatlands to climate change and their feedback on future warming. Northern peatlands hold huge stocks of vulnerable carbon and nitrogen, and their release risks amplifying climatic warming. Increasingly prevalent reports of abrupt changes to peatland environments from thawing permafrost, extreme fires and droughts suggest massive reorganisation of Arctic and Boreal ecosystems, with impacts lasting several hundred years. This will challenge societal climate mitigation efforts, making climate stabilisation targets significantly harder to meet than current models project. The most recent IPCC report concluded that peatlands, permafrost and fire are the largest warming feedbacks which are still missing in earth system models (ESM). To address this, transformative scientific collaboration is urgently needed. CLIMPEAT aims to address the critical knowledge gaps that hinder coupled-climate projections of northern peatland dynamics, by leveraging synergistic expertise in mapping, remote sensing, biogeochemistry, process modelling and coupled climate projections. We propose to (i) create uniform and high-quality wall-to-wall northern peatland maps, which include layers that quantify the properties that make them vulnerable to change; (ii) improve empirical process understanding by implementing a first-ever landscape-scale permafrost thaw experiment and quantify disturbance effects on greenhouse gases and lateral fluxes; (iii) integrate this empirical understanding and data into a hybrid AI-powered process-based model, and (iv) design and implement peat-enabled ESM simulations to assess the risk of amplifying global warming from abrupt changes and increased greenhouse gas emissions. This project addresses key critical feedbacks missing in current ESM and will inform climate mitigation strategies, making a significant contribution to global efforts in combating climate change.