Stefan Metzger
Patty Oikawa
George Burba
Susanne Wiesner
National Ecological Observatory Network
Abstract:
To avert the most drastic consequences of climate change a combination of engineered, natural and societal solutions are envisioned, connected via a greenhouse gas (GHG) economy and government incentives. Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of GHG emissions reduced or removed from the atmosphere by these solutions are central to ensuring that revenue streams develop in proportion to true climate benefits. However, current MRV limitations in cost, robustness, interoperability, and multi-year latency pose grave risks to the ultimate goal of reducing the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. These challenges can be addressed by creating a MRV underlying asset that is directly and frequently measured, uniformly derived, universally applicable to the engineered and natural solutions, and near-real time traceable in space and time.
Technology transfer of the latest, most direct GHG quantification methods from academic climate science to GHG MRV and markets provides a promising avenue to create the underlying asset: Next-generation information reconstruction is applied to existing regional, continental and global networks of direct GHG flux tower measurements to achieve unmatched statistical power, interpretability and process insight. This will generate an orders-of-magnitude improved stream of directly-measured emission and sequestration rates for robustly anchoring GHG remote sensing products and models. The resulting underlying asset directly represents the financial security, here physical GHG emission and sequestration. This enables assessing the value of financial derivatives, here various GHG certificates based on discipline-specific protocols, according to factors such as protocol reliability and storage duration.
This approach is traceable in space, and results in a map with sub-facility pixels of GHG emission or sequestration amount per unit of time to be locked in a blockchain and presented via mobile Apps and APIs. This enables public awareness, GHG certificate intercomparisons, development of regulatory and financial products, tools, and commercial services while preventing tampering, deleting, or modifying. Paths to monetization include licensing to credit originators, offset takers and market makers, through connecting pixel-scale GHG emission and sequestration to regulatory practice for a range of GHG certificate protocols, industries, stakeholders and management practices. With this conceptual outline, we invite all types of stakeholders to join Carbon Dew and become a part of the alliance for direct GHG exchange measurements informing equitable worldwide emissions trading.
Bios:
Stefan Metzger; National Ecological Observatory Network, Battelle, Boulder, CO, US
Ph.D. in Micrometeorology from the University of Bayreuth, Germany
Science Lead for Surface-Atmosphere Exchange at the US National Ecological
Observatory Network (81 sites, > 180 free, open data products)
Science Steering Committee Member at AmeriFlux (Americas flux tower network > 500 sites)
Data Integration Lead at FLUXNET (Global flux tower network > 1,000 sites)
George Burba; LI-COR Biosciences, Lincoln, NE, USA
LI-COR Science & Strategy Fellow
Global Fellow at the Water for Food Global Institute
Graduate Adjunct Professor of Bio-Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Nebraska
Patty Oikawa; Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences,
California State University East Bay, Hayward, CA, USA
PhD in Biogeochemistry from the University of Virginia
Postdoc in Biometeorology at UC Berkeley
Science lead for North American network of flux towers in tidal wetlands (Department of Energy)
Co-author of greenhouse gas methodology for wetland restoration in the San Francisco Bay Delta
Susanne Wiesner; Assistant Professor, Department of Plant and Earth Science, University of Wisconsin, River Falls, WI, USA
MS in Hydrology and PhD in Biology with focus on ecosystem dynamics of energy, entropy and carbon in response to extreme events (droughts, etc.)
Postdoc at US Dairy Forage Research Center (through Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education) & Dairy Innovation Hub fellow at UW Madison research focused on improving life cycle assessments of agroecosystems using flux towers and remote sensing
Recent publication linking flux tower and remote sensing models using the environmental response function approach for one dairy farm