Almost all life on Earth depends on the Earth’s thin protective layer, the atmosphere. The institutes participating in this topic use high-resolution regional climate projections to produce predictions of the state of the atmosphere in terms of its interaction with land ecosystems, oceans, and ice as well as anthropogenic emissions. The research relies on novel observational and modelling techniques of atmospheric chemistry, which makes it possible to assess how effective climate change adaptation measures are and which mitigation strategies are particularly promising.