News

The recent UN Climate Change Conference held in Bonn, Germany, was the next step by governments towards the implementation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. This conference aimed at accelerating the global transformation to a sustainable, resilient and climate-safe environment.

At the conference, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged world leaders to follow through with the Paris Agreement and to increase climate action commitments: "Climate change is the defining threat of our time. Our duty - to each other and to future generations - is to raise ambition."

Representatives from 200 countries and organisations discussed the fundamental question of how states measure their CO₂ emissions and worked together towards agreement on the international rules for implementing the Paris Agreement.

Accurate and comparable measurements play a vital role in the protection of environmental and climate changes. A key challenge for Europe is protecting the environment and safeguarding our quality of life whilst maintaining economic growth. Meeting increasing demands for accurate long term climate change data requires technological innovations and improvements to meteorological measurements traceability.

EURAMET's European Metrology Research Programmes, EMRP and EMPIR, funded research projects to improve climate change measurement accuracy therefore helping to increase the quality of data used in environmental policy making. By working with the academic, meteorology and space communities, European NMIs ensure that measurements of the internationally defined Essential Climate Variables are available to climate scientists and policy makers.

Andrea Merlone (INRIM, Italy), Convenor of EURAMET’s Task Group ‘Metrology for Environment’ says: “Better measurements in the climate sector will show their real benefit in the coming years or decades. The main effort in detecting climate change should be focussed on how to harmonise and compare the climate data to some reference. The task of the measurement community is to contribute to the improvement of data quality that only metrology can deliver. We hope the next generation of climatologists will have in their hands accurate, traceable and, most of all, comparable data, in both space and time.”

EURAMET projects have:

• Developed an environmental chamber to enable devices for temperature, pressure and humidity sensors to be calibrated at remote climate sensing stations so creating better measurements links to the SI
• Made significant progress towards the goal of an 'NMI in space' that will calibrate and validate climate data from Earth observation satellites
• Improved confidence in climate data
• Improved accuracy in atmospheric and upper atmosphere data
• Contributed to improved measurements and control for greenhouse gas emissions which are contributing to climate change