IES: Action 24002 - GHG-AFOLU

8. November 2007

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» IES - Institute for Environment and Sustainability : The Institute : Units : Climate Change : Action 24002 - GHG-AFOLU

Action 24002 - GHG-AFOLU

Action 24002 - Greenhouse gases in Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Uses (GHG-AFOLU)



	The IES greenhouse gas flux measurement tower in Parco Ticino

How can we verify if we meet the targets of the Kyoto Protocol?

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol requires the Parties – among them the European Union – to monitor and report the implementation of emission reductions. Issues of data quality are very much stressed by the Protocol. For the EU, the Climate Change Committee hosted by DG Environment is responsible for establishing the monitoring system and for taking care of its reliability and the environmental integrity of actions taken. The Action provides Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) for greenhouse gas emissions and sinks as part of the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventory System. This QA/QC engages experts from Member States and Candidate Countries, as well as contributions of relevant EU institutions such as the European Environment Agency and Eurostat. Issues are tackled according to their degree of uncertainty, lack of consensus, or relevance for achieving the EU Kyoto target. Hence, the focus is on CO2 sequestration in forestry and agriculture, CH4 and N2O emissions from agriculture, and trade-offs between greenhouse gas emissions and sinks from land use changes. From 2005 onwards, activities will expand towards effects of climate change on ecosystems, with an increasing integration of monitoring and modeling activities.

Specific objectives of the Action are:

To improve the intercomparability of measuring and reporting of CO2 sinks and emissions of CH4 and N2O, through activities with Member States and Candidate Countries as part of the EU Greenhouse Gas Inventory System;
To create EU-wide data sets and model-based techniques relevant for monitoring carbon stocks and greenhouse gas fluxes (emissions and sinks) in the EU, and apply them to verify and improve official Member State submissions;
To develop schemes for monitoring CO2 sinks and the effects of climate change as contribution to the Forest Focus regulation;
To improve knowledge about greenhouse gas balance and of climate change impacts in terrestrial ecosystems, through long term observations of fluxes of CO2, CH4, N2O between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and how they are affected by climate, climate change, air pollution and nitrogen deposition;
To engage in scenario modeling of agriculture, land use change and forestry at European and global scale, in order to complement the scenario calculations related to energy performed elsewhere;
To systematically provide the relevant stake-holders with up-to-date and condensed policy relevant research, and to probe for their further information needs in the field of climate change;
To provide training to experts from the new and candidate countries on monitoring and reporting of carbon stocks and greenhouse gas emissions and sinks.

The Action runs two experimental sites for the measurement of greenhouse gas fluxes, located in Parco Ticino near Pavia and in Parco San Rossore near Pisa (both in Italy). The EMEP station at the Ispra site will be increasingly involved. The work carried out at these sites contributes to the datasets, process understanding and regional estimates elaborated in the frame of the FP6 Integrated Project CARBOEUROPE-IP (Assessment of the terrestrial carbon balance of Europe), where the Action leads the Work Packages Science/Policy interface and Database of auxiliary data, co-ordinating also the North-Italy cluster of flux/ecology sites. The Research Action contributes also to other FP5 and FP6 research projects such as: CARBOINVENT, EVERGREEN, CAPRI-DynaSpat, and GEMS.

More information can be found on the Climate Change Unit web pages.