The proposed monitoring system will improve the understanding of the complete carbon cycle.
Lars Peter Risjosgaard, head of the WMO’s Integrated Observing Systems branch, said there was relatively good data on how much CO2 is emitted.
“We know in aggregate how much coal, oil and gas we dig up. We can assume it’s all burned up,” he said.
“Some of it goes into the land surface and some into the ocean. We understand the sum of the two, but not the individual components as well.
“We really need to understand this whole system of what we do.”
Some greenhouse gas concentrations, he said, were influenced by natural processes, not just human activity.
He said that successful mitigation must be based on the whole system, “not just on what we do to it”.
Reliable funding is also proving to be a problem.
Most current greenhouse gas monitoring relies heavily on research capabilities and funding, which is intermittent. The WMO said most research funding is subject to competitive allocation, which makes continuous global monitoring “difficult to achieve”.
The proposals emerging from this week’s symposium will be presented to the WMO’s Executive Council meeting in February and then to the World Meteorological Congress – the WMO’s highest decision-making body – in June 2024.