Collaborative Research: USG Support for the Past Global Changes Project International Program Office

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The Past Global Changes Program, is an open and international organization that coordinates global change science internationally, prioritizes key topics, facilitates cross-disciplinary research, promotes syntheses of results, and ensures dissemination of data, results, and knowledge. PAGES fills a unique niche and adds value to individual and national research. Over the next four years, PAGES will organize interdisciplinary working groups and cross-cutting activities that address relevant community-driven science issues, via open and international workshops, and synthesize knowledge and data. Its objectives are to link data products with Earth system modeling, translate regional knowledge of climatic and environmental changes into actionable information useful for decision-makers, and build capacity among young scientists and in nations less established in science. PAGES' activities all center around four themes: the Climate theme will inform climate projection efforts, and combined with modern and historical observational evidence will contribute to climate services. The Environment theme will address research topics central to Future Earth and inform environmental management efforts such as landscape conservation, ecosystem management, and fire control. The Humans theme will inform adaptation strategies and contribute to specific solutions for policy makers and resource managers; there is transformative potential to develop novel approaches involving social scientists or economists within this theme. Results from the cross-topical integrated activities on tipping points, extreme events, and warmer worlds, are targeted to inform risk assessments and natural disaster mitigation.PAGES will exist under the new Future Earth program and intensify its partnership with the World Climate Research Program. The community-built scientific structure proposed here will align with these programs' agendas. PAGES' new structure will encourage integrative activities related to the sustainability issues prioritized by Future Earth and the World Climate Research Program. In addition to the research output generated by scientific activities, PAGES will ensure broad impact by: identifying key science issues that can only be addressed through a transnational community approach; advocating for the incorporation of scientific evidence into wider Earth system science and international assessments; communicating scientific results to Global Environmental Change scientists, the media and public; contributing to data management in collaboration with NSF-EarthCube and NOAA; and building capacity among developing country and young scientists through active involvement, educational meetings, mentorships, and by organizing the Open Science and Young Scientists Meetings.PAGES has a record of producing scientific output, including over 300 publications since 2010, with numerous major syntheses. Many publications obtained wide attention in the broader scientific community and contributed substantially to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment. Long-lived value was created by coherent data compilations that increased the number of available data by ~5 times. PAGES intends to support transnational working groups, to provide vehicles for data-model integration, and to facilitate community data syntheses that add expertise and value to individual results and contribute to international assessments such as the IPCC and Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Under the new structure the Climate theme will address climate dynamics at the regional to global scales to obtain improved records of climate forcing, sensitivity and Earth system feedback. It will also assess model skills and provide insight into non-linearities, thresholds and the predictability of climate over long time intervals. The Environment theme will address the components of the biosphere that interact with climate change and introduce long-term feedback into the Earth system including biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem dynamics and ecosystem services. The Humans theme will address long-term environmental changes where humans are a major agent and where environmental changes have an effect on the functioning and well-being of ecosystem services and societies. In addition, cross-topical integrated activities such as thresholds and tipping points, extreme events, warmer worlds and data management, will encourage an interdisciplinary, synthesizing approach among the scientific community and other stakeholders.