Our objective is to understand and predict Global Environmental Change. We study how ice, oceans, atmosphere, land surface and biosphere have interacted in the past, we probe their current processes, and we develop predictions of their future dynamics. Human impacts on our planet are changing the atmosphere, climate, ice cover, global biogeochemistry, biodiversity, soils, and even ocean circulation. This puts Global Change at the centre of the international scientific agenda. A key aim of the Global Change Group is to forecast the nature of change in the Earth System. This relies on understanding the building blocks of the system, represented by the Group's programmes: Atmosphere, Biosphere, Cryosphere, Continents, and Oceans. These programmes involve fieldwork, monitoring, experimentation, theory and simulation, designed to determine how the earth's systems work, how they operated in the past and where they are going in the future.