Climate change is a complex problem involving nonlinearities and feedback that operate across scales. No single discipline or way of thinking can effectively address the climate crisis. Teams of natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, economists, and policymakers must work together to understand, predict, and mitigate the rapidly accelerating impacts of climate change. Transdisciplinary approaches are urgently needed to address the role that microorganisms play in climate change. Here, we demonstrate with case studies how diverse teams and perspectives provide climate-change insight related to the range expansion of emerging fungal pathogens, technological solutions for harmful cyanobacterial blooms, and the prediction of disease-causing microorganisms and their vector populations using massive networks of monitoring stations. To serve as valuable members of a transdisciplinary climate research team, microbiologists must reach beyond the boundaries of their immediate areas of scientific expertise and engage in efforts to build open-minded teams aimed at scalable technologies and adoptable policies.

Climate change jeopardizes human health, global biodiversity, and sustainability of the biosphere. To make reliable predictions about climate change, scientists use Earth system models (ESMs) that integrate physical, chemical, and biological processes occurring on land, the oceans, and the atmosphere. Although critical for catalyzing coupled biogeochemical processes, microorganisms have traditionally been left out of ESMs. Here, we generate a "top 10" list of priorities, opportunities, and challenges for the explicit integration of microorganisms into ESMs. We discuss the need for coarse-graining microbial information into functionally relevant categories, as well as the capacity for microorganisms to rapidly evolve in response to climate-change drivers. Microbiologists are uniquely positioned to collect novel and valuable information necessary for next-generation ESMs, but this requires data harmonization and transdisciplinary collaboration to effectively guide adaptation strategies and mitigation policy.