Masa Kageyama ^1* Pascale Braconnot ¹ Cristiano M. Chiessi ² Kira Rehfeld ³ Yassine Ait Brahim ^4,5 Marina Dütsch ⁶ Benjamin Gwinneth ⁷ Alicia Hou ⁸ Marie-France Loutre ⁹ Marfasran Hendrizan ^10,11 Katrin Meissner ¹² Precious Mongwe ¹³ Bette Otto-Bliesner ¹⁴ Luciano Ponzi Pezzi ¹⁵ Alessio Rovere ^16,17 Alan Seltzer ¹⁸ Louise Sime ¹⁹ Jiang Zhu ²⁰

• ¹ UMR8212 Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), Gif-sur-Yvette, France
• ² Schoool of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• ³ Department of Geosciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tubingen, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
• ⁴ International Water Research Institute, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic, Benguerir, Morocco
• ⁵ Department of Environment, Agriculture and Geography, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada
• ⁶ Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics, Faculty of Earth Sciences, Geography and Astronomy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, Austria
• ⁷ Département de géographie, Faculté des Arts et des Sciences, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Ontario, Canada
• ⁸ UMR5805 Environnements et Paléoenvironnements Océaniques et Continentaux (EPOC), Pessac, Aquitaine, France
• ⁹ Past Global Changes (PAGES), Hochschulstrasse 4, Bern, Switzerland
• ¹⁰ Research Center for Climate and Atmosphere, National Research and 24 Innovation Agency (BRIN), KST Prof. Samaun Samadikun, Jl. Sangkuriang, Bandung, Indonesia
• ¹¹ UMR6112 Laboratoire de Planetologie et Geodynamique (LPG), Nantes, Pays de la Loire, France
• ¹² Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
• ¹³ Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
• ¹⁴ NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global 31 Dynamics Laboratory, Boulder, United States
• ¹⁵ Laboratory of Ocean and Atmosphere Studies (LOA), Earth Observation and 33 Geoinformatics Division (DIOTG),National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil
• ¹⁶ Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca 'Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Veneto, Italy
• ¹⁷ Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Bremen, Germany
• ¹⁸ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, United States
• ¹⁹ British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Cambridge, United Kingdom
• ²⁰ NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory, Boulder, United States

Paleoclimate information has played an instrumental role in showing how fast climate can vary and how large these changes can be. It provided the first vivid demonstration of the relationships between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and surface air temperatures, as well as striking representations of climate change impacts and possible feedbacks within the climate system, such as those associated with vegetation or ice sheet changes. Here, a short review of recent advances in paleoclimate studies is provided, with the objective of showing what this information on past climates and environments can bring to research on current and possible future climates. We advocate that 1) paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental information can be leveraged for narratives about climate change, in particular at the local and regional levels, 2) paleoclimate data is essential for out-of-range tests of climate models, since future climates are also out of the range of recent climate information used for calibrating climate models, 3) paleoclimate data, in particular for the last millennia, is essential for taking multi-centennial and multi-millennial variability into account when describing trends related to anthropogenic forcings and attributing climate change signals, in particular for extreme and rare events, and 4) paleoclimates also provide extremely valuable information for initializing the slow components of climate models. In addition, we show how paleoclimate studies can be beneficial to put recent and future climate change into context and improve our knowledge on key processes. They can both benefit from and contribute to models and knowledge based on the study of recent and future climates.