From International Astronautical Federation

Plenary Six
Informing Climate Change mitigation decisions through global carbon monitoring

This Climate Day Plenary Event addressed the status of carbon monitoring and the reasons why long-term sustained measurements and modeling are needed to inform energy-climate policy decisions.

Precise measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) are currently being made from a global network of ground based stations. While this network has expanded continuously over the past 50 years, it still lacks the resolution and coverage needed to map CO₂ sources and sinks on regional scales over the globe. The network is particularly sparse in the tropics and over the ocean. One way to fill these gaps is to make global measurements of atmospheric CO₂ from space.

James Graf, moderator of the session, started his opening talk with the role of carbon dioxide in the global carbon cycles, and emphasized the importance of understanding the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. He then divided the problem to three groups of management, modeling, and decision support/action, with introducing representatives of each group among the session speakers.

Takashi Moriyama, from JAXA, started his talk by explaining GOSAT and the status of the project, hoping to start the calibration and validation of GOSAT data at the end of October.He also explained other carbon dioxide monitoring done by JAXA, including the Geo Carbon Community, the efforts to implement a global carbon observation system, and Carbon Observation Satellite (COS).

David Crisp, the principal investigator at the Orbiting Carbon Observatry of NASA, and the second speaker of the session, focused on the sensitivity, accuracy, and resolution of data necessary to assist the decision makers. He showed examples of the carbon dioxide distribution maps, and cabon dioxide measuring systems. At th end of his talk, he addressed the role of Orbiting Carbon Observatory in future works.

Going to the modeling, Gen Inoue, the chief scientist of GOSAT/Ibuki and the director of the Centre for Global Environmental Research (NIES) talked about the components of the global carbon observatory systems, and the top down approaches used. He emphasized on the necessity of improvements in the models. He also explained the poit source analysis, a method through which the events such as forest fires and large leakage of the pipelines are detectable. The next speaker, Florin Vladu, manager of the Analsis and Mehods sub-programme Adaption at UNFCCC, addressed the third group, decision support/action. He started by giving a detailed description of objectives, and principles of UNFCCC. He addressed the ways that observation systems support decision making in future, and gave examples of demandsfor data and observations.

The last speech before the question and answer session was delivered by Hoesung Lee, the vice-chair of IPCC. The earth’s temperature change, and the reasons to care about this issue, the cost of carbon dioxide abatement, and the importance of global participation in climate change policies were some of the topics he included in his talk. Dr Lee also briefly explained the portfolian and market-based approaches and precautionary principles in climate change policies.

The sixth plenary, with the theme of climate change, ended with a short Q&A session.

Reported by Mahsa Taheran

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