Permafrost vulnerability to climate change: understanding thaw dynamics and climate feedback of permafrost degradation

Permafrost regions are undergoing profound changes under a warming climate, with significant implications for Earth system feedback, ecosystems, and infrastructure. This editorial synthesizes findings from 35 interdisciplinary studies featured in this focus issue, which collectively advance our understanding of permafrost degradation dynamics and their cascading impacts. The contributions span a wide range of spatial scales from site-level process studies to regional syntheses. The studies encompass critical research scopes, including thaw processes, hydrology-ecosystem interactions, biogeochemical feedback, and emerging techniques in monitoring and modeling (e.g. AI and machine learning). Collectively, these studies highlight the critical importance of integrative, cross-disciplinary approaches for characterizing and understanding permafrost vulnerability. These studies also underscore the need for sustained investment in observational networks, methodological innovation, and coordinated synthesis efforts to improve predictive capabilities and understand long-term consequences of permafrost thaw and the associated adaptive responses in a rapidly evolving cryosphere.