Rapid Response Communication for Greenhouse Gas Budget Verification

The Horizon 2020 project "Observation-based system for monitoring and verification of greenhouse gases" (VERIFY) aimed to develop scientifically robust methods to assess the accuracy and potential biases of national greenhouse gas emissions reported by countries through an independent pre-operational framework. The aim of RapidVERIFY has been to translate the scientific material from VERIFY into an accessible format that is relevant for Norwegian users and to communicate it continuously to the users. The material should primarily be short and focused, ranging from articles (blogs, fact sheets, opinion content), short video content, presentations, as well as social and traditional media activity. With COVID from early 2020, the plans had to be changed somewhat, and the main project VERIFY was also extended to 31 July 2022. In response to COVID-19, a paper was published in Nature Climate Change (Le Quéré et al 2020) under the VERIFY project on reductions in carbon dioxide emissions due to COVID-19 measures. In July 2020, the global methane budget was published in Earth System Science Data (Saunois et al 2020). And the global nitrogen oxide budget was published in Nature in October 2020 (Tian et al 2020). The Global Carbon Budget was published in December 2020 (Friedlingstein et al., 2020). In 2021, a commentary was published in Nature Climate Change which updated the understanding of the corona pandemic's effect on emissions during 2020 (Le Quere et al 2021). Due to the corona pandemic, the format of some of the communication activities was changed. A Norwegian report 'Main figures and data from the Global Carbon Project' was written and published by the Norwegian Climate Foundation and financed through the project. UiB led the development of a video for a wide audience about the ocean's carbon cycle, with imminent release (August 2022). The Global Carbon Budget 2021 was presented in March 2022, one of the first physical meetings after the Corona period. This was well attended with presentations on the global picture, and with more detailed presentations on China and India. Based on the work with methane and nitrous oxide, a blog post was written about the methane lift, and a CIENS breakfast seminar was organized in April, with researchers from both NILU and CICERO. Throughout the project period, several presentations have also been held throughout 2021 and 2022 for public agencies and a wider audience.