COUP

What is the COUP project about?

COUP aimed to improve the way climate models deal with permafrost, ground that is frozen all year round. As the global climate warms, thawing permafrost may lead to increased greenhouse gas release from the huge amounts of carbon frozen into the earth. This permafrost-carbon climate feedback is important, but remains poorly understood. The overall aim of COUP is to use detailed understanding of landscape-scale processes to improve global scale climate models. Better predictions of how permafrost areas will respond to a warming climate can help us understand and plan for future global change.

Highlights

• COUP supported new field campaigns which allowed us to samples soils and describe ecosystems in unique, remote Arctic locations. This includes the first studies of peat-rich mountain soils in NW Canada and discovering a new source of methane from the receding Greenland ice-sheet.
• COUP used field data to improve the state-of-the-art CryoGRID permafrost model that will form the basis of the next official global permafrost map.
• In COUP, we were able to use knowledge from detailed studies and specialised permafrost models to improve the global scale climate model UKESM. New runs with the improved model showed us that the permafrost-carbon feedback is important to consider if we want to reach global warming stabilisation at +1.5 or 2° C.

Keywords

Keywords: JPI COUP; permafrost; climate change; permafrost carbon feedback; climate model

Potential societal impacts

COUP has generated extensive new knowledge about the permafrost-climate feedback, especially focusing on low emissions scenarios relevant to the COP21 Paris Agreement and the SDG no 13 “Climate Action” under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. These results have been published in high-impact papers that are being absorbed into high-level syntheses documents, such as reports from the IPCC. The results of this research thus has the potential to influence global climate policy.

The role of JPI Climate

The unique opportunity offered by JPI Climate to collaborate across multiple countries and to initiate and deepen collaboration between scientist working in the field and with modelling. The JPI framework allowed us to gather a large group of scientists, but also allowed greater scientific freedom than traditional EU consortia which allowed us to adapt and improve our science as the project progressed.