Over 120 scientist from 26 countries convened in the City of Paris for the second scientific symposium of the WMO IG3IS.
IG3IS is a WMO initiative to deliver science-based services for societal benefits. These valuable services intend to better inform and evaluate efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants that reduce air quality. These services are delivered via measurement-based information systems that analyze the spatial and temporal variations of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations together with statistical data on emission activity. IG3IS develops and documents good-practice standards for these methods so that the information provided will be consistent and reliable across a geographically broad and diverse set of user communities.
Paris is the location of the Origins urban GHG monitoring project and the COllaborative Carbon Column Observing Network (COCCON), and we were honored to have Célia Blauel, Deputy Mayor of Paris for the environment, sustainable development, water, canal policies and the Climate Energy Plan, open the meeting with a presentation about the commitment of Paris to rely on the best available science in the urgent need to tackle climate change.
The meeting continued with a rich set of presentations on research results and application achievements. The agenda was organized around the four primary IG3IS objectives: 1) informing the quality control and assurance of national emission inventories, 2) informing GHG emission reduction policies in large urban source regions, 3) detecting and quantifying large unknown hot-spots of industrial methane emissions, and 4) applications at the global scale intended to support the UNFCCC Paris Agreement Global Stocktake.
An important goal of the meeting was to kick-off the IG3IS inverse modeling crosscut activities. These activities intend to advance the state of the art for inverse modelling for emission estimates and to ensure that these estimates are reliable and consistent representations of what is observed in the atmosphere. Two experiments have been chosen that are focused on urban and national objectives, and will be implemented through a series of benchmarking exercises recommended by the first workshop in Lund, Sweden. The Paris meeting agenda included discussion sessions led by Thomas Lauvaux and Sander Houweling intended to better define the implementation of these crosscutting experiments.
During the last day of the meeting, the team discussed a plan for developing an architecture for IG3IS governance to be aligned with the new World Meteorological Organization strategy and structure after its reform, as well as in the next steps in order to scale-up the initiative with emphasis in the developing countries.
ICOS and Origins supported the activity and are largely engaged with IG3IS initiative as part of the scientific and practitioner community.
