The Arctic Circle Berlin Forum "The Arctic at Crossroad"

21 May 2024

Photo: Julia Boike

At this year's Arctic Circle Forum, Prof. Dr. Victor Brovkin from the MOMENT team reported on the challenges of representing climate-biosphere interactions in the Arctic in ecosystem models and the need to integrate the feedback factor "permafrost" into these models.

The Arctic Circle Berlin Forum took place in May 2024, organized by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and AWI (Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam). It brought together international representatives from politics, science and indigenous peoples, among others. "The Arctic at Crossroad" was the theme of this year's forum, which had permafrost degradation as one main theme. The focus was on the ecological (changes in the carbon balance) and geopolitical (mass resettlement as thawing permafrost leads to soil instability) changes in the Arctic due to the warming climate. It has become abundantly clear that time is running out for the Arctic regions with their permafrost soils.

One session was jointly organized and chaired by Prof. Dr. Richard Essery from the University of Edinburgh and Prof. Dr. Julia Boike from AWI. The session's topic was "Arctic land surface processes in Earth system models". In this session, Prof. Brovkin gave a keynote speech on the opportunities and challenges of Earth system modeling. One problem is that several assumptions in previous Earth system models cannot be applied to the Arctic, or only to a limited extent. This underlines the need for integrated research in the field, laboratory and in modeling in order to better represent the changing feedback factor "permafrost" - this is precisely where the MOMENT project comes in.