14 Apr 2025
As part of RECCAP3, the "Global Carbon Project" is developing detailed national greenhouse gas budgets. The goal is to better quantify regional sources and sinks – a crucial step toward effective climate policy.
Dozens of fluxes need to be quantified for a full national greenhouse gas budget, as this subset for Australia illustrates. | © Canadell et al., NSR, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaf037
As human-induced climate change intensifies, there is a growing demand for more comprehensive greenhouse gas intelligence to support the development and implementation of mitigation policies. Building on two successful first phases, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) is now developing phase 3 of the Regional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes project (RECCAP3). A perspectives paper published in National Science Review and co-authored by LMU’s Julia Pongratz outlines the project.
Globally, comprehensive GHG budgets with the skill and detail to separate natural and anthropogenic GHG sources and sinks have played a critical role in supporting the development of global decarbonization pathways. LMU scientists have a leading role in these annual global carbon budgets (more information here).
Now, this type of comprehensive greenhouse gas budget is required at the national scale, where climate and energy policies are implemented. RECCAP, which previously focused on large, regional budgets, strives to progressively move to providing complete greenhouse gas budgets at country level. In comparison to the global budgets, which aim to deliver systematic, harmonized estimates for all countries in the world, the national budgets under RECCAP3 can harvest a wealth of additional information available only at smaller level, like regional measurement systems and ecosystem-specific modeling.
“I expect RECCAP3 to bring particular progress in fields that are not yet of global relevance, such as coastal carbon dioxide removal through mangroves, saltmarshes and seagrass meadows.” says Julia Pongratz. Furthermore, RECCAP3’s national budgets will support resolving the discrepancies between national greenhouse gas budgets based on global modeling vs those based on country reporting. While these discrepancies have been traced back to different definitions, they cannot fully be explained for all countries (more information here). More regional expertise, modeling and observational data could bring breakthroughs and thus facilitate progress towards climate neutrality.