  Global climate change, extreme climate events, earthquakes and their
accompanying natural disasters pose significant risks to humanity. Yet due to
the nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions and complex structure of the
Earth system, the understanding and in particular the predicting of such
disruptive events represent formidable challenges for both scientific and
policy communities. During the past years, the emergence and evolution of Earth
system science has attracted much attention and produced new concepts and
frameworks. Especially, novel statistical physics and complex networks-based
techniques have been developed and implemented to substantially advance our
knowledge for a better understanding of the Earth system, including climate
extreme events, earthquakes and Earth geometric relief features, leading to
substantially improved predictive performances. We present here a comprehensive
review on the recent scientific progress in the development and application of
how combined statistical physics and complex systems science approaches such
as, critical phenomena, network theory, percolation, tipping points analysis,
as well as entropy can be applied to complex Earth systems (climate,
earthquakes, etc.). Notably, these integrating tools and approaches provide new
insights and perspectives for understanding the dynamics of the Earth systems.
The overall aim of this review is to offer readers the knowledge on how
statistical physics approaches can be useful in the field of Earth system
science.
