— Ch. 1 · Founding And Partnerships —
Global Carbon Project.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
The Global Carbon Project began its work in 2001 as a formal partnership among four major international science programs. These founding groups included the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the World Climate Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme, and Diversitas. They operated under the umbrella of the Earth System Science Partnership to tackle rising greenhouse gas concentrations together. This collaboration brought emissions experts, earth scientists, and economists into a single organizational framework for the first time. The project aimed to fully understand the carbon cycle by combining diverse scientific disciplines. Many core projects from this initial partnership later became part of Future Earth in 2014. The structure allowed researchers to gather, analyze, and publish data on greenhouse gas emissions in an open and transparent fashion.
Annual Budget Methodology
In 2005 the organization established the Global Carbon Budget as an annual publication tracking global carbon sources and sinks. Each year the team revised and updated data along with changes in analysis or results. The original measurements came from multiple organizations and research groups around the world rather than a single source. The effort presented was mainly one of synthesis where results from individual groups were collated and evaluated for consistency. Primary datasets included fossil-fuel and cement emissions globally by fuel type and country from Boden et al. in 2013. Atmospheric CO2 growth rates relied on data published by Dlugokencky and Tans in December 2012 through NOAA/ESRL. Ocean and land CO2 sinks were modeled using work by Le Quéré et al. published in 2013. In 2013 the annual publication became a living data publication at the Earth System Science Data journal.