Scientists in the ocean, terrestrial and atmospheric carbon observation fields have plotted a way towards building capacity to strengthen the country’s ability to observe accurately the changing greenhouse gas emissions.
This follows their meeting at the National Research Foundation (NRF) offices in Pretoria.
Stellenbosch University’s School for Climate Studies’ Prof. Pedro Monteiro says, “What we want is, in three to five years’ time to have this, I’d like to call it, a gold standard of carbon observation.”
Monteiro says, “The country’s scientists in the field were already doing a lot of this work, but they combined efforts minimally. The workshop and future initiatives stemming from it will address.”
“What’s really amazing is that when we look at our community now, we realise that we can do all the required parts of that puzzle. In some parts of the regional ocean-land-atmosphere system, we can now go from some ocean or terrestrial measurements at a few locations to reconstructing 20 to 30 year maps of regional carbon variability using machine learning techniques. We can extend this to the whole region, but we need now to put it together so that what we have in three years’ time is bigger than the sum of the parts that we have at the moment.”
