The last 2000 years has always been one of the main study periods of Past Global Changes (PAGES). Asia is an ideal area to conduct synthesis studies on the climate changes for the past 2000 years due to its long history and abundant proxy types with a high time-resolution; however, at present, the related research work is still in its infancy.

Professor GE Quansheng and his team from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS reviewed the PAGES synthesis study on climate changes in Asia over the last 2000 years and found that during the past 1200 years there was a warmer period (830- 1220), a colder period (1340- 1880), and a rapid warming period (the 20th century).

In this study, the established background and goals of the last 2 millennia climate research network, past global changes (PAGES2K) were introduced, and the distinctive significance of Asia2k in PAGES project was expounded. The main research progresses from PAGES-Asia2k working group and contributions of China to the synthetic climate reconstructions of the last 2000 years were also addressed.

In addition, GE and his team analyzed the challenge and key issues during the studies on climate reconstructions over Asia, and discussed the research activities in the future work. They pointed out that the climate of Asia is characterized by various types, complicated process changing and large regional differences. Thus, the future work of this project will focus on the following topics: developing the new methodologies for climate change reconstructions to improve the reliabilities of reconstructed results in individual sites (regions) and the temporal- spatial resolutions, data coverage for the whole continent; developing the PAGES- Asia2k proxy climate database for synthesis study to reconstruct the regional temperature series and spatial patterns of wet and dry changes; furthermore, studying the mechanism and impact of climate change and its adaptation at regional scale.

The related result has been published in the journal of Acta Geographica Sinica [Ge Quansheng, Zheng Jingyun, Hao Zhixin (2015). PAGES synthesis study on climate changes in Asia over the last 2000 years: Progresses and perspectives. Acta Geographica Sinica. 70(3): 355-363].