The International Workshop C⁴ “Climate Change and Carbon Cycle” (Pisa, 22-24/06/2022) envisions knowledge exchange and cross-pollination within the scientific communities interested in Global Changes, Climate System and Carbon Cycle through time. Predicting interactions between Earth’s climate and carbon cycle is challenging because of the volume of feedback and the number of processes involved. A growing wealth of geosphere, atmosphere, ocean, and ecosystem reconstructions and observations has provided essential insights into how climate change affects the ways that carbon moves through Earth’s environment from the deep past to the modern era, and into how carbon cycle perturbations affect climate system.  Yet, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Perhaps the most challenging and societally relevant is whether the rate at which the land and ocean can sequester carbon will continue to keep pace with rising carbon dioxide emissions and the impact on Earth systems that could be associated with it. To face this important challenge, we aim to discuss the frontiers of a new interdisciplinary research in which the integration of the different geological, biological, anthropic components, together with new emerging technologies, will produce a novel, global scientific view of the Earth System across time scales.

The overarching goal of C⁴ is to foster novel opportunities for collaborations among scientists by bringing together experts from different disciplines.

C⁴ welcomes contributions from proxy records of the deep geological past to modern observations and modelling that:

(i) explore linear and non-linear processes resulting from interactions between climate system and carbon cycle at multiple time scales;

(ii) provide insights into the past and present expression of combined climate and carbon changes in environments and ecosystems;

(iii) highlight the current knowledge gaps and how they can be filled through the combined efforts of the Climate, Paleoclimate and Carbon Cycle communities.