Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Arctic Climate Scientist

I am an ecohydrologist who studies the impact of climate change on the Arctic-Boreal region. The northernmost part of our planet is warming much faster than the rest of the world, which is increasing disturbances – such as droughts, snow cover loss, and permafrost thaw. My research focuses on how this affects the uptake of carbon by plants, and its release from soils, potentially triggering a release of greenhouse gases that can act as a feedback on the global climate system.

In my work, I draw from my broad experience in the field, from Svalbard to northeast Siberia, to derive new insights from satellite data and to advance model development. At present, I leverage this expertise as the PI of "SnowLess" (2025-2028), funded by the Research Council of Norway. By combining field measurements and lab experiments, we will improve the capability of the demographic vegetation model CLM-FATES to simulate how shrubs and trees are damaged by extreme winter weather – such as frost droughts and rain-on-snow events.

In addition, I am a contributor to expert assessments from AMAP – a working group of the Arctic Council. I was a lead author on two reports, heading chapters on natural methane emissions in their 2015 and 2021 assessments, and I was a contributing author on two others (SWIPA 2017 and Key Trends and Impacts 2021). Furthermore, I am a regular columnist in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen, and I'm an Associate Editor at JGR: Biogeosciences.

For the past couple of years, I have led the Norwegian-Swedish research project WINTERPROOF where my PhD students improved the representation of snow dynamics, plant hydraulics and soil biogeochemistry in the models CLM-FATES and LPJ-GUESS. This project significantly reduced the uncertainty in model projections of arctic carbon-climate feedbacks.

I have worked at research institutes across Scandinavia and in the Netherlands: 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 did my 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 focusing on the carbon dynamics of a Norwegian 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.