Are We at Risk of Losing the Current Generation of Climate Researchers to Data Science?

Climate model output has progressively increased in size over the past decades and is expected to continue to rise in the future. Consequently, the research time expended by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) on data-intensive activities is displacing the time spent in fostering novel scientific ideas and expanding the frontiers of climate sciences. Here, we highlight an urgent need for a better balance between data-intensive and foundational climate science activities, more open-ended research opportunities that reinforce the scientific freedom of the ECRs, and strong coordinated action to provide infrastructure and resources to the ECRs working in under-resourced environments

Reflections on the CLIVAR Early Career Scientists Symposium 2016

We present a summary report of the CLIVAR Early Career Scientists Symposium, a three-day event associated with the CLIVAR Open Science Conference held in Qingdao, China during September 2016. The Symposium aimed to capture the ideas of early career researchers on pressing science priorities, imminent challenges, and emerging opportunities to help guide the future evolution of CLIVAR. We identified the need for improving process-based understanding and predictability of regional climate variability and change, moving toward seamless predictions, and improving and expanding global observations. We emphasize the need for increasingly open science, including universal access to data, code, and publications as well as opportunities for international cooperation and exchange. As the next generation of climate scientists, we are dedicated to overcome the challenges outlined in this summary and are looking forward to advancing CLIVAR???s mission and activities

Are We at Risk of Losing the Current Generation of Climate Researchers to Data Science?

Climate model output has progressively increased in size over the past decades and is expected to continue to rise in the future. Consequently, the research time expended by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) on data-intensive activities is displacing the time spent in fostering novel scientific ideas and expanding the frontiers of climate sciences. Here, we highlight an urgent need for a better balance between data-intensive and foundational climate science activities, more open-ended research opportunities that reinforce the scientific freedom of the ECRs, and strong coordinated action to provide infrastructure and resources to the ECRs working in under-resourced environments

Are We at Risk of Losing the Current Generation of Climate Researchers to Data Science?

Climate model output has progressively increased in size over the past decades and is expected to continue to rise in the future. Consequently, the research time expended by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) on data-intensive activities is displacing the time spent in fostering novel scientific ideas and expanding the frontiers of climate sciences. Here, we highlight an urgent need for a better balance between data-intensive and foundational climate science activities, more open-ended research opportunities that reinforce the scientific freedom of the ECRs, and strong coordinated action to provide infrastructure and resources to the ECRs working in under-resourced environments

Ten new insights in climate science 2022

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Technical summary We synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and animals; (4) climate (im)mobility and the need for anticipatory action; (5) security and climate; (6) sustainable land management as a prerequisite to land-based solutions; (7) sustainable finance practices in the private sector and the need for political guidance; (8) the urgent planetary imperative for addressing losses and damages; (9) inclusive societal choices for climate-resilient development and (10) how to overcome barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C. Social media summary Science has evidence on barriers to mitigation and how to overcome them to avoid limits to adaptation across multiple fields

Promoting involvement of early-career scientists from the Asia-Pacific region in regional integrated and sustainable development through active participation and networking

Climate change is affecting global ecosystems, natural resources, and human well-being. The near- and long-term future sustainable development of society requires robust climate change information at regional scales. To contribute to the purpose mentioned above, WCRP CORDEX (the World Climate Research Programme’s Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) initialised a collaboration with the APN (Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research), as the two programmes share common goals in advocating climate science as well as transferring climate knowledge for effective management. This APN project, entitled “Promoting Involvement of Early Career Scientists from the Asia-Pacific Region in Regional Integrated and Sustainable Development through Active Participation and Networking”, was a result of this collaboration. Specifically, the project was aimed at supporting early-career scientists from the Asia-Pacific region to attend an international science conference on regional climate science (ICRC-CORDEX 2019) and facilitate them in international partnership-building. It also contributed to enhancing communication and cooperation amongst regional climate research teams within and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. As one of the most important activities of the conference, the project supported an event for early-career scientists. The completion of the project consolidated global collaboration between the climate research community and that of adaptation-impact studies, as well as facilitated interaction with end-users. It was also a successful showcase of the scientific strategies of APN and CORDEX

Sensitivity Analysis of a Land-Use Change Model with and without Agents to Assess Land Abandonment and Long-Term Re-Forestation in a Swiss Mountain Region

Land abandonment and the subsequent re-forestation are important drivers behind the loss of ecosystem services in mountain regions. Agent-based models can help to identify global change impacts on farmland abandonment and can test policy and management options to counteract this development. Realigning the representation of human decision making with time scales of ecological processes such as reforestation presents a major challenge in this context. Models either focus on the agent-specific behavior anchored in the current generation of farmers at the expense of representing longer scale environmental processes or they emphasize the simulation of long-term economic and forest developments where representation of human behavior is simplified in time and space. In this context, we compare the representation of individual and aggregated decision-making in the same model structure and by doing so address some implications of choosing short or long term time horizons in land-use modeling. Based on survey data, we integrate dynamic agents into a comparative static economic sector supply model in a Swiss mountain region. The results from an extensive sensitivity analysis show that this agent-based land-use change model can reproduce observed data correctly and that both model versions are sensitive to the same model parameters. In particular, in both models the specification of opportunity costs determines the extent of production activities and land-use changes by restricting the output space. Our results point out that the agent-based model can capture short and medium term developments in land abandonment better than the aggregated version without losing its sensitivity to important socio-economic drivers. For comparative static approaches, extensive sensitivity analysis with respect to opportunity costs, i.e., the measure of benefits forgone due to alternative uses of labor is essential for the assessment of the impact of climate change on land abandonment and re-forestation in mountain regions

Towards a more integrated role for early career researchers in the IPCC process

The involvement of early career researchers (ECRs) has been limited during the past Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment cycles. We conducted a global survey among ECRs and interviewed key experts of the IPCC process. Our results show that ECRs are highly motivated to become actively involved in the IPCC process but face a number of barriers to contribute. Mutually beneficial ways forward on how ECRs could contribute are outlined here, and recommendations to implement these paths are suggested to IPCC as well as to ECRs. Concluding, we show that ECRs have great potential to actively contribute to the IPCC process for the continuity of the IPCC as well as to climate science in general.Fil: Gulizia, Carla. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera; ArgentinaFil: Langendijk, Gaby. Climate Service Center Germany; AlemaniaFil: Huang Lachmann, Jo Ting. Climate Service Center Germany (gerics); AlemaniaFil: de Amorim Borges, Pablo. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina; BrasilFil: Flach, Rafaela. Universitat Hamburg; AlemaniaFil: Githaiga, Cicilia. Institute For Advanced Sustainability Studies; AlemaniaFil: Rahimi, Mohammad. Semnan University; Irá