Joint Operations for monitoring antHropogenic and Natural GHG emissions and sinks

Climate change is a massive challenge facing humanity which the EC will mobilise significant resource to address as part of the 'Green deal'. High quality information streams regarding sources and sinks of greenhouse gases are key for decision making, with it being key that these are usable, accessibility, effective and interoperable in order to ensure that governments, citizens businesses and civil society are able to make informed decisions regarding the management of the climate crisis. Currently our major source of information regarding the global cycles of climate controlling GHGs is the Global carbon project, composed of a myriad of individual local, national and continental scale programmes that contribute to multiple 'value chains' which link together observations, data synthesis and analysis activities to reporting. This project is remarkably sucessful: each year it delivers an authoritative report regarding the state of the previous years global carbon cycle to the COP, however the value chains it is based on are fragile, and in some cases declining in quality. In the near future this will be joined by the WMO Global Greenhouse Gas Watch which aims to deliver a major transformation in the quality of information made available for decision making. This project will support this transformation via 1. Undertaking a comprehensive audit of the current state of the observing system, including governance & financial arrangements, setting in place a function to report this annually, and understanding the barriers to the system operating at the level required 2. Horizon scanning the next generation of technologies that will enable these value chains to run at lower cost, 3. Delivering tangible improvements to the current value chain, 4. Devise comprehensive action plans to deliver the longer term transformation required. This will all be accompanied by a comprehensive strategy to ensure that the action plans are structured to match available funding streams.