WMO approves a global tracker for greenhouse gas emissions

The World Meteorological Congress has approved a new greenhouse gas (GHG) monitoring initiative in a landmark decision, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a press note. The initiative supports urgent action to reduce heat-trapping gases, which are fuelling temperature increases.

The new global GHG watch will fill critical information gaps and provide an integrated and operational framework. The framework will bring all space-based and surface-based observing systems, as well as modelling and data assimilation capabilities, under one roof.

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Many of the existing international and national activities dealing with greenhouse gases are supported mainly by the research community. At present, there is no comprehensive, timely international exchange of surface and space-based greenhouse gas observations or modelling products. 

The Congress resolution endorsing the establishment of the Global Greenhouse Gas Watch received unanimous support from WMO’s 193 members. 

It recognised “the growing societal importance of greenhouse gas monitoring in support of improving our scientific understanding of the Earth System, and the urgent need to strengthen the scientific underpinning of mitigation actions taken by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement,” the press note added. 

The GHG watch will consist of four main components:

• A comprehensive, sustained, global set of surface-based and satellite-based observations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) concentrations, total column amounts, partial column amounts, vertical profiles and fluxes and supporting meteorological, oceanic, and terrestrial variables, internationally exchanged as rapidly as possible, pending capabilities and agreements with the system operators;
• Prior estimates of the GHG emissions based on activity data and process-based models;
• A set of global high-resolution Earth System models representing GHG cycles;
• Associated with the models, data assimilation systems that optimally combine the observations with model calculations to generate products of higher accuracy.

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“We know from our measurements that greenhouse gas concentrations are at record levels — in fact higher than at any time over the last 800,000 years,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. 

“The increase in carbon dioxide levels from 2020 to 2021 was higher than the average growth rate over the past decade and methane saw the biggest year-on-year jump since measurements started,” Taalas added.

GHG monitoring infrastructure will help improve understanding of the carbon cycle. Understanding the full carbon cycle is vitally important for the planning of mitigation activities. 

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Globally consistent, gridded information on GHG and their fluxes with appropriate time resolution will help in the improved evaluation of sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and indicate their association with the biosphere, the ocean and the permafrost areas. 

The monitoring infrastructure will build on and expand WMO’s long-standing activities in GHG monitoring, implemented as part of the global atmosphere watch and via its integrated global GHG information system.

Read more:

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• Increased chance of earth breaching 1.5°C in next five years
• Humid heatwaves in South Asia made 30 times more likely by climate change: Study

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