CONCERTO project kick-off meeting
21-22 January 2025 | Milano – BASE, V. Ambrogio Bergognone da Fossano, 34
Terrestrial ecosystems are key to the functioning of the global carbon cycle and play a fundamental role in mitigating climate change. According to the Global Carbon Budget, about 30% of all the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted in the atmosphere is removed by vegetation uptake through photosynthesis and accumulation of biomass (so called CO2 sinks on land). Land use change, nutrient limitations, and extreme events (e.g. droughts, fires and heat waves) may limit this potential to sequester carbon.
Identifying processes that might destabilise net land carbon uptake is of paramount importance for understanding and managing the global carbon cycle. CONCERTO aims to improve:
- the current understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle by adding land processes that are not included yet or not fully developed in Land Surface Models (LSMs);
- the representation of land change, land use and land management maps to improve the accuracy of carbon fluxes and stocks;
- the description of impacts on the carbon cycle of extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and fires, using tools such as state-of-the-art land surface models (LSMs) embedded into Earth system models (EMSs);
- the integration of LSM improvements in offline global simulations (driven by re-analyses) and in coupled ESMs.
ORGANIZED BY:
CMCC, CONCERTO Project