The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a landmark agreement entered into force in November 2016. The Paris agreement is aimed at reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emission for keeping the global warming below 2^oC. The commitments and progresses of each country should be carefully monitored, reported and verified by international bodies. In recent years, the number of observational platforms for monitoring atmospheric GHGs is increasing. National or regional inventories of emissions have also been prepared at greater resolution in space and time. However, due to uncertainties in modeling tools, and limited observational data coverage, high uncertainty still remains in global or regional sources/sinks estimations, particularly for carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Our urgent needs are to harmonize the increasing number of earth observation platforms for monitoring GHGs such as satellites, aircraft, ships, and ground stations, and to reduce their source/sink estimation uncertainties. Atmospheric transport modeling, inverse modeling, and assimilation methods should be tested and improved for process level understanding of regional fluxes of GHGs. All results should be complemented by the both "top-down” approach (with inverse models) and "bottom-up” approach (with surface flux/emission network data and ground-based models). The assessments of climate change and their impact on the global and regional GHGs budgets with high accuracy is needed for decision making. This will contribute to the UNFCCC’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 13 "Climate Action" by providing additional sources of information that can complement the national inventories. International collaborative efforts in the framework of GEO are strongly needed to develop an integrated and globally coordinated carbon observing and analysis system.

Co-Chairs:
   Antonio BOMBELLI, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Italy
   Yi LIU, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP/CAS), China
   Nobuko SAIGUSA, National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan