The ESF is involved in climate change research through many of its activities. For example, EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) is currently running several programmes within this area. For example, at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in April 2007, the emphasis during the ESF US5 session on Monday 16 April, where project leaders from programmes such as EuroCLIMATE, EuroDIVERSITY, EuroMARC and EUROMARGINS talked, was on understanding the Earth processes, both past and present.

EuroCLIMATE, for example, focuses both on reconstructing past climates using different well-dated and calibrated proxy records and on modelling climate and climate variations for a better understanding of the underlying physical, chemical and biological processes involved (for example biomineralisation and biocrystallisaton). Vernadsky Medal winner Jaap Sinninghe Damste, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, is involved in several EUROCORES Programmes including the EuroCLIMATE project CHALLACEA. Read more about how he uses biomarkers to understand climate change.

EuroMARC, through the project CHECREEF, is looking at fossil coral reef cores to track climate change. Read more about Gilbert Camoin and his Tahiti expedition.

The programme BOREAS has a central theme: humans facing climate change. The programme analyses how seasonality and climate change drive the high level of human and animal movement and create highly integrated zones of contacts. When launching the BOREAS project 'Moved by the State: Perspectives on Relocation and Resettlement in the Circumpolar North (MOVE)', at the European Polar Year Launch in November 2006, Ivan Csonka, President of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association, expressed how “The results [of MOVE] will become increasingly relevant in the ongoing negotiations between states and communities about relocation in the face of increasing social and climatic change”. MOVE shows that the discourse is not simply one of human adaptation to climate change - but politically willed social and economic change. Read the full article here.