Objective
WP7 will ensure that the actions of VERIFY will be fully integrated and world leading, building on those activities that have demonstrated track records of delivering useful, policy-relevant information. Strong links will be established with international efforts such as the Global Carbon Project (GCP), the ICOS ERIC Research Infrastructure or the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System (IG3IS) by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
WP7 will ensure that the actions of VERIFY will be fully integrated and world leading, building on those activities that have demonstrated track records of delivering useful, policy-relevant information. This will happen mainly at two levels: (1) since the guidelines for verification are still under construction as there are many questions about the details of how to compare EU emissions with other regions and how to best build protocols and interfaces, the VERIFY innovations have to be integrated into an international science-based framework such as the Global Carbon Project17 (GCP) which provides annual Carbon Budgets and recently released a Global CH4 budget (in 2017, the N2O budget). The EU supported those kind of activities in the past resulting in good uptake of its own principles, e.g. by financially supporting the GCP via EU projects during 2008-2015. (2) ICOS ERIC as an ESFRI Research Infrastructure and other European research institutions in the VERIFY consortium contribute to the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System18 (IG3IS) by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the Carbon and Greenhouse Gases Initiative of the Group on Earth Observation (GEO-C initiative19). These initiatives also work towards the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) wihch is obliged to periodically report to the UNFCCC-SBSTA on the status and development in the global observing systems for climate, and are aligned with the CEOS Carbon Monitoring from Space priorities20. GCOS has recently launched its new Implementation Plan “The Global System for Climate: Implementation Needs”. This plan addresses the Paris Agreement and responds to the growing need for systematic observations including GHG for the provision of climate services. Within an envisaged cooperation between VERIFY and GCOS and UNFCCC we will provide regular information from carbon observation and support SBSTA with actual concepts to provide knowledge from data and modelling as resulting from the VERIFY project.
Although the main user groups of VERIFY will be institutions, including official inventory agencies, policy-makers and operational monitoring organizations (Copernicus programme, ECMWF, ICOS-ERIC in Europe, WMO and GCOS at international level), there is a growing demand from the private sector (large companies with emitting activities) and regional authorities (cities21, regions22) for improved methods to track the effectiveness of their GHG reduction measures. The development of added value products with private sector stakeholders based on transferable research methods from WPs 2 to 5 is organised in WP7 through the Climate-KIC, the largest innovation programme in Europe on climate-smart technologies. Climate-KIC will connect VERIFY partners with its large network of corporate partners and innovators to identify products that could be commercialised and help bring to the market relevant innovations from WPs 2 to 4.
