Global Carbon Project

• 1. Introduction

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  The Global Carbon Project exists to answer one of the most consequential questions of our time: exactly how much carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide is humanity pumping into the atmosphere, and where is it all going? Founded in 2001 as a partnership among four major international science programmes, the GCP pulled together emissions experts, earth scientists, and economists under a single mission. That mission is to fully understand the carbon cycle. What the project has found over the years has not been reassuring. In late 2006, researchers determined that carbon dioxide emissions had risen to an annual rate of 3.2%, far faster than the decade before. The group's chair at the time, Dr. Mike Raupach, did not mince words: he called it a very worrying sign, saying that recent efforts to reduce emissions had had virtually no impact on emissions growth. The questions that drive this documentary are the ones the GCP has spent decades trying to answer. Where exactly is the carbon going? Who is producing it? And is the world doing anything fast enough to matter?

• 2. Founding and Structure

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  The Global Carbon Project was born out of a four-way partnership: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the World Climate Programme, the International Human Dimensions Programme, and Diversitas. These four bodies jointly formed it under the broader Earth System Science Partnership. In 2014, many of those core partner programmes folded into the successor organisation Future Earth. The GCP's administrative structure is genuinely international. Its executive director is Josep Canadell of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, known as CSIRO. The current chairman is Rob Jackson of Stanford University. Past co-chairs include Naki Nakicenovic of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia, and Philippe Ciais of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace. Beyond its headquarters, the project maintains international offices in Tsukuba, Japan, and Seoul, Korea. A scientific steering committee of roughly a dozen researchers drawn from five continents guides the organisation's direction. That breadth of geography and expertise reflects the project's core method: it does not generate all data itself but synthesises results from research groups around the world, collating and checking them for consistency before publishing.

• 3. Tracking the Carbon Budget

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  In 2005 the GCP launched the Global Carbon Budget, an annual accounting of where carbon enters the atmosphere and where it gets absorbed. Since 2013, that publication has operated as a living data record hosted at the Earth System Science Data journal, meaning each yearly edition carries revised figures alongside the latest analysis. The underlying measurements come from a wide network of organisations. Territorial fossil-fuel and cement emissions, broken down by fuel type and country, trace back to Boden and colleagues at CDIAC. Atmospheric CO2 growth rates are drawn from Dlugokencky and Tans at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. Ocean and land carbon sinks are modelled by Le Quéré and collaborators. The 2018 edition of the Budget carried a particularly stark finding: fossil CO2 emissions that year were projected to rise by 2.7% to a record 37.1 billion tonnes. Atmospheric CO2 concentration was on track to average 407 parts per million for the year, which the GCP noted was 45% above pre-industrial levels. Natural gas and oil were identified as the primary drivers of that rise. Coal use was also expected to grow in 2018, though it had not yet returned to its historical peak recorded in 2013.

• 4. Ocean Sinks and Record Jumps

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  A 2010 study the GCP published in Nature Geoscience put a number to the ocean's role in the carbon cycle: the world's oceans absorb roughly 2.3 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. That figure matters because oceans act as a partial brake on atmospheric warming, drawing down a portion of what fossil fuels and land-use change release. The 2011 analysis from the project delivered a counterpoint to that buffer. Carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning had jumped by 5.9% in 2010 alone, the largest single-year increase on record. That compared to an annual growth rate closer to 1% through the 1990s. Combustion of coal accounted for more than half of that jump. The GCP's projections at the time pointed toward the IPCC's worst-case scenario, with atmospheric CO2 concentrations on a path toward 500 parts per million during this century. By 2018, the record stood at 407 ppm, meaning the margin between current concentrations and that threshold was already narrowing.

• 5. Methane, Nitrous Oxide, and Expanding Scope

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  Carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas the GCP tracks. In 2020 the project released its newest Global Methane Budget alongside its first-ever Global Nitrous Oxide Budget. These two trace gases are the most dominant anthropogenic contributors to warming after CO2, and their explicit inclusion marked an expansion of the GCP's scope beyond carbon alone. The work on land-use change emissions has also grown more refined. The 2021 Global Carbon Budget report highlighted a method for estimating the difference between land-use change emissions as reported in national greenhouse gas inventories and the GCP's own calculations, which the project described as a way to support an assessment of collective national climate progress. That kind of cross-checking between national self-reporting and independent scientific measurement sits at the heart of what the GCP was designed to do.

• 6. The Global Carbon Atlas

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  In 2013 the GCP launched the Global Carbon Atlas, a web-based platform designed to make the project's data accessible well beyond the scientific community. The Atlas has three distinct components. The outreach component is aimed at the general public and those working in education. The emissions component visualises parts of the carbon cycle tied to human activity and is directed primarily at policy makers. The research component functions as a data repository and visualisation tool for scientists investigating the carbon budget. All three are updated annually, most recently as of December 2018, drawing on whatever figures the latest Global Carbon Budget has confirmed. The premise behind the Atlas is that the same dataset can serve a school student and a government negotiator if the presentation is tailored appropriately. It is one concrete answer to the question of what an international scientific project can do beyond publishing in academic journals, and it positions the GCP's findings where decisions about emissions policy are actually made.