Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Arctic Climate Scientist

I am an ecohydrologist who studies the impact of climate change on Arctic-Boreal ecosystems. The northernmost part of our planet is warming much faster than the rest of the globe, leading to extreme temperatures, loss of snow cover and more frequent droughts. These changes affect plant growth and permafrost thaw, which in turn may cause the release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Since these dynamics have the potential to enhance climate change, I study how and why the flows of water and carbon are changing across the landscape.

In my research, I draw from a long experience in the field, in northeast Siberia, Greenland, Scandinavia and Svalbard, to derive new insights from satellite data and to advance model development. This has given me a broad understanding of the functioning of northern ecosystems, which I call on as a regular columnist in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen, and in my role as an Associate Editor at the AGU journal JGR:Biogeosciences.

For the past couple of years, I have led the Norwegian-Swedish research project WINTERPROOF where two PhD students of mine improved the representation of snow dynamics, plant hydraulics and soil biogeochemistry in the models CLM-FATES and LPJ-GUESS. One of the main outcomes of this project is a reduced uncertainty in model projections of arctic climate feedbacks. See my list of publications for more project outcomes.

In addition, I am a contributor to expert assessments of AMAP, a working group of the Arctic Council. I was a lead author on the 2015 report on methane and the 2021 assessment on short-lived climate forcers, as well as a contributing author on the SWIPA (2017) and Arctic climate change update 2021 reports.

I have worked at several research institutes in Scandinavia and the Netherlands in the past: I received my PhD in 2011 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for my dissertation on the drivers of greenhouse gas exchange from arctic tundra. I continued as a postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, where I studied how atmospheric warming from sea ice decline affects carbon cycle dynamics across the Arctic.

In 2016, I led a research project at the Norwegian Research Institute Nibio on the impact of an extreme winter event on the carbon balance of a coastal peatland, which was followed by a research stay at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. From 2018 to 2023, I had a shared research position between Lund University and the University of Oslo, while leading the WINTERPROOF project. After the conclusion of this project, I continued full time at the University of Oslo as a senior researcher.