A recent DG for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs - JRC expert report proposes a strategy for the establishment of a European observation system dedicated to monitoring CO 2 emissions from space. Such space-borne CO 2 observation capacity would provide the EU with a more significant role in the compliance verification of the new international climate agreements.

The current efforts to limit and reduce CO 2 emissions use self-reported data to define baselines and to assess the effectiveness of climate and energy policies. Self-reported inventories of CO 2 emissions offer limited transparency and their accuracy and completeness cannot be assessed independently. In order to monitor the effectiveness of any future climate agreement, self-reported emissions data will need to be independently assessed for their accuracy and reliability.



The report recommends to set up the system in three successive phases.

© EU, 2015

Against this backdrop, a group of scientific experts set up by the Commission assessed the need for a system that would monitor CO 2 emissions at global, European and country level, and concluded that it would be relevant and timely to develop an operational system to monitor CO 2 emissions. The report also identifies the current and future technical capacities that would enable such an observation system to be operational by the 2030s.

The space-borne CO 2 observation capacity, which should be developed within the European Earth observation programme Copernicus, would benefit from both satellite and in-situ measurements to monitor and to verify the compliance of parties to international climate agreements. The system would greatly contribute to the full policy cycle addressing the reduction of CO 2 concentration in the atmosphere.

As a follow-up to the European Parliament's resolution of 15 October 2015 on the use of space-based assets for monitoring trends in GHG emissions, this report gives Member States a scientific state-of-the-art overview and a robust proposal for an international greenhouse gas verification system based on data assimilation. It also provides food for discussion at the upcoming COP 21 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (30 November – 11 December 2015).