Global Carbon Project: Major Initiatives

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) established in 2001 seeks to quantify global carbon emissions and their causes. The GCP brings together emission experts and economists to tackle the problem of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The projects of GCP include global budgets for three dominant greenhouse gases namely carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide and complementary efforts in urban, regional, cumulative, and negative emissions.

Initiatives of GCP:

Carbon Atlas

The Global Carbon Atlas established by GCP is a platform to explore and visualize the most up-to-date data on carbon fluxes resulting from human activities and natural processes. Human impacts on the carbon cycle are the most important cause of climate change. The Carbon Atlas aims to collate data about on the global carbon cycle to a wider audience from the school children and lay people to policy makers and scientists. The Carbon Atlas has three components

• Outreach: The Outreach component is aimed at general public and those involved in education sector.
• Emission: The Emission component provides for visualisation tool for parts of the global carbon cycle that are related to emissions and is aimed primarily at policy makers.
• Research: The Research component is aimed at researchers and acts as a data repository and visualisation tool for scientific data that is used to investigate the global carbon budget.

All components of the Carbon Atlas are updated on an annual basis, based on the data published in the Global Carbon Budget. It provides for the most up to date data and interpretation of carbon cycle processes.

Global Carbon Budget

The Global Carbon Budget established by GCP is an annual publication of carbon cycle sources and sinks on a global level. Since 2013 the Global Carbon budget has become a living data publication at the Earth System Science Data journal. The data is revised and updated every year to provide upto date interpretation of the behaviour of the global carbon cycle.

Global Methane Budget

The Methane Budget established by GCP aims to provide for a consortium of multi-disciplinary scientists to synthesize and stimulate research on the methane cycle, and producing regular (∼ biennial) updates of the global methane budget.

Global Nitrous Oxide Budget

GCP along with International Nitrogen Initiative has created an international consortium of scientists to establish and improve the global N2O budget, trends and variability. It is a new initiative of GCP and the new budget is expected to be released by early 2019.