The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has disclosed that governments and the international scientific community were considering an UN-led plan to combat climate change by substantially improving the way heat-trapping air pollutants are tracked worldwide.
In the next five years, the WMO initiative will likely result in the establishment of a network of ground-based measuring stations that can independently confirm alarming air quality data that has been detected by satellites or aircraft.
Calling for an “improved (international) collaboration” and data exchange to support the 2015 Paris Agreement, which provides a roadmap for reduced carbon emissions and climate resilience, the UN agency said, “At present, there is no comprehensive, timely international exchange of surface and space-based greenhouse gas observations.”
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A Senior Scientific Officer at WMO, Dr Oksana Tarasova, said, “It’s not just anthropogenic emissions (that will be monitored), but what the forests are doing, what the oceans are doing,” adding that “We need this information to support our mitigations because we have no time to lose.”
Tarasova recalled that in 2022, WMO reported the largest-ever observed increase of methane and the reasons for this increase are still not known, hence one of the functions of this new proposed infrastructure would be to help fill in the gaps which we have in our knowledge regarding the observations and regarding the use of these observations.
However, the WMO has stressed that cooperation between governments, international organizations and the private sector will be essential if the proposed Global Greenhouse Gas Monitoring plan is to be viable.
Story was adapted from UN News.
