Carbon Dew: Direct Greenhouse Gas Exchange Measurements Anchor Equitable Climate Solutions Worldwide

A combination of technological, nature-based and demand-side solutions are envisioned to avert the most drastic consequences of climate change, connected via a greenhouse gas (GHG) economy and government policies (e.g., net-zero incentives, compensations etc.). Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of GHGs reduced or removed from the atmosphere are central to ensuring that revenue streams develop in proportion to true climate benefits with equitable rewards for small and large originators.

However, current MRV limitations (e.g., cost, robustness, interoperability, scalability, multi-year latency, etc.) curtail our ability to approach climate solutions in a well-informed and consistent manner. This challenge can be addressed by creating an MRV benchmark that is directly and frequently measured, uniformly derived, universally applicable to the technological and nature-based solutions, and traceable in near-real time and space. In order to narrow the knowledge-action gap the social and natural sciences both recognize this need for continuous information on local GHG emission and sequestration akin to weather intelligence.

Technology transfer of the latest, most direct GHG quantification methods from academic climate science to the climate solution marketplace provides a promising avenue for creating such a benchmark: Next-generation information reconstruction (https://tinyurl.com/flux-tower-mapping) applied to existing local-to-global networks of direct GHG flux measurements can achieve unmatched statistical power, interpretability and process insight. This integration will generate an orders-of-magnitude improved stream of directly-measured emission and sequestration rates for robustly anchoring project-scale GHG mitigation and wall-to-wall remote sensing and models. The resulting benchmark directly represents a financial commodity: the physical emission and sequestration of GHGs. Thus, they can be used to manage GHGs in day-to-day practices and to assess the value of financial derivatives such as GHG certificates based on discipline-specific protocols, while accounting for reliability, storage duration and other factors.

This approach will result in decameter-resolution maps of GHG emission and sequestration per unit of time, locked in a secure vessel such as a blockchain to prevent tampering, deleting, or modifying. Access via mobile Apps and APIs will enable public awareness and confidence, climate solution research, GHG certificate intercomparisons, development of regulatory and financial products, tools, climate-smart technologies, practices and commercial services, and national as well as local policies. Paths to monetization include licensing to credit originators, offset buyers and marketplaces, through connecting pixel-scale GHG exchange 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: the Community of Practice that aims to anchor equitable climate solutions worldwide in direct measurements of GHG sequestration and emission (https://tinyurl.com/join-carbon-dew).