Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: The United Nations has launched a major effort to try to fill a significant gap in the fight against climate change and standardized real-time tracking of greenhouse gases.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization brought together over 250 experts this week in Geneva “to arrange the different jigsaw puzzle pieces into a single framework”.
All these efforts aim to standardize how information is collected, fill in the knowledge gaps on where greenhouse gas emissions end up, and produce much accurate data on how the atmosphere of the planet changes.
“Climate change is the most demanding and long-lasting challenge of the current time,” Hugo Zunker, from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program, told attendees.
“Without knowing how the climate changes and the risks bringing these changes, we cannot plan for a climate-resilient and sustainable future,” he said
United Nations on tracking greenhouse gases
The three key greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide, where CO2 only accounts for about 66 percent of the warming effect on the climate.
The current Global Atmosphere Watch Program observes greenhouse gas levels from ground-based stations in pristine locations like Tasmania, Tenerife, and Hawaii.
However, the WMO said there needed to be a comprehensive, timely international exchange of surface at present and space-based greenhouse gas observations.
The agency further said there needed to be more doubt about the role of carbon-absorbing places like the Amazon rainforest, the ocean, and permafrost areas.
Chief of WMO Petteri Taalas said that “big uncertainties” exist regarding CO2 sources and absorption and the same about methane.
The WMO greenhouse gas bulletin 2021, issued at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt last year in November, revealed the biggest yearly increase in methane level since 1980, “and we don’t fully understand the reason behind that”,Taalas said.
WMO is developing a concept for an internationally-coordinated Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Infrastructure , a major subject of this week’s gathering.
The New Framework
The new framework should facilitate greenhouse gas surface and space-based observing systems, along with common standards and rapid access to its measurements.
It should also improve worldwide coordination of modeling and data compilation.
The data generated should offer solid, detailed information to communities and states signed up to the Paris climate accords, assisting them in tailoring their mitigation action.
Meanwhile, the 2015 Agreement in Paris on climate change saw different countries agree to cap global warming at below two degrees Celsius above levels measured between 1850 and 1900, and 1.5C if possible.
The newly proposed monitoring system would improve understanding of the full carbon cycle.
Head of the WMO’s Integrated Observing System branch, Lars Peter Riishojgaard, remarked that there was relatively agreeable data on how much CO2 is emitted.
He further said they knew by and large how much coal, oil, and gas they dig out. We can utilize all of it is burned off,” he said.
“Some of it moves into the land surface and others into the ocean.
“We require to know this whole system here quite a little better than we do.”
He added that some greenhouse gas concentrations were influenced by natural processes, not just by human actions.
Most current greenhouse gas monitoring depends heavily on research capabilities and funding, which is intermittent.
Most of the research funding is subject to a competitive allocation that makes sustained global monitoring challenging to achieve, said the WMO.
All the proposals that appeared from this week’s symposium will be forwarded to the WMO’s executive council. Later , the information would be passed on to WMO’s supreme decision-making body, World Meteorological Congress, in June 2024.
