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| 26 May 2026 | |
| Blogs |
By Dr. Kim Mueller, Senior Fellow, GHG Coalition / Climate Data Collaborative
In late April 2026, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) convened the IG3IS Stakeholder Consultation and User Summit in Geneva, a three-day gathering that brought together atmospheric scientists, national and subnational regulators, city officials, development banks, NGOs, and private sector actors working on measuring and monitoring emissions at decision relevant scales. The questions driving the agenda were deceptively simple: what are atmospheric observations actually for, and is the data trustworthy enough to act on?
As climate commitments harden into regulatory requirements and market mechanisms, those questions carry real weight. The quality and credibility of greenhouse gas (GHG) data is becoming a prerequisite for climate finance, compliance, and mitigation at scale. The Summit was an opportunity to continue conversations on how to close the distance between what the atmospheric science community can deliver and what decisionmakers actually need.
The Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System, known as IG3IS, is a flagship initiative of the WMO's Global Atmosphere Watch Programme. Established to connect nations, cities, and organizations to GHG atmospheric research, IG3IS translates the science behind emissions sources and sinks by integrating atmospheric observations with traditional inventory, or bottom-up, accounting methods — a process the community understands as a two-way conversation. Over the past decade, IG3IS has developed internationally recognized good practices for estimating GHG emissions and removals at national and urban scales, and the community is actively working toward extending those methods to the facility level and, longer term, to carbon removal verification. With intergovernmental standing and scientific credibility, IG3IS is positioned to anchor the standards-setting work the emissions data ecosystem needs, work that no single country, company, or research institution can do alone.
The observational toolkit has expanded considerably in recent years. Satellites now provide global coverage and can detect previously invisible methane plumes. City-scale flux towers and mobile measurement campaigns complement the more established network of stationary in-situ monitoring sites. The science of detecting emissions has advanced far beyond where it stood a decade ago, especially as researchers push to understand emissions at scales relevant to stakeholder needs.
The harder challenge is translating observations into actionable information. Moving from raw atmospheric signals to reliable emissions estimates at urban or facility scales requires robust methodological frameworks, careful uncertainty quantification, and interpretive work that connects scientific outputs to formats regulators and markets can act on. That translation problem is where much of the field's energy now needs to go.
One theme that came up repeatedly was that a single measurement increasingly serves multiple end users. Detecting a methane plume is simultaneously relevant to emissions accounting, energy system management, and public health. This can change who monitors emissions and why, and raises important questions about how data governance should be structured when the same observation supports multiple, sometimes competing, uses.
Methane dominated the technical conversations at the Summit, given its potency and the tractability of near-term mitigation opportunities across sectors. Nitrous oxide received attention for its role in agriculture and wastewater. Carbon dioxide remains the longer-horizon challenge, technically and institutionally. All sectors and all GHGs will eventually need to be legible within reporting mechanisms, and building and sustaining that infrastructure was central to the convening.
The Summit's cross-section of participants reflected a broader shift in who has a stake in emissions data. Alongside atmospheric scientists and national inventory developers were regulators, city officials, development bank representatives, carbon market practitioners, and delegations from countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. GHG data is increasingly relevant to finance, trade, and public accountability.
The presence of financial sector stakeholders was particularly notable. Banks, insurers, and carbon market participants need reliable emissions data to inform lending, underwriting, and investment decisions, but the data available to them is either not at the right scale, self-reported, or aggregated by commercial vendors. Atmospheric observations offer something different: a scientifically grounded, independent picture of actual emissions that can validate important emissions accounting frameworks including reporting through inventories or disclosures. The challenge is making those measurements translatable within the frameworks that financial and regulatory actors actually use. Whether atmospheric data ultimately shapes regulation, finance, or markets depends on measurement quality, methodological rigor, and credible shared standards that bridge the scientific and decision-making communities. IG3IS is advancing work on all of these fronts, and the Summit was structured so that the people who would need to act on that guidance were part of shaping it.
Progress in this field looks like regulators incorporating atmospheric data into compliance frameworks, and development banks asking harder questions about the provenance of emissions data underlying project assessments. It looks like methodological guidance that actually gets adopted and solidified as best practice standards. Moving the needle on GHG mitigation requires building relationships, developing capacity, establishing standards, and shifting mindsets. All of this takes time, and it is the kind of foundational work whose payoff is long-term. Funders and advocates who want real change need to understand and support that pace.
In the United States, that work is being taken up by efforts like the Data Foundation's GHG Coalition, a nonpartisan technical network spanning academia, the private sector, NGOs, and government voices, focused on coordinating and advancing the domestic greenhouse gas measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification landscape. The Coalition's work reflects the same core challenge surfaced at the Summit: the science has advanced significantly, but the focus now needs to be on connecting it to the end users who can act on it. Conversations like the IG3IS Summit matter because they establish the international frameworks that domestic efforts like the GHG Coalition can align with and build on.
IG3IS is beginning the next phase of its standards work, developing best-practice guidance for facility-scale methane emissions and for forest-based carbon dioxide removal. If you are interested in being involved in shaping these guidelines, please contact Kim.Mueller@datafoundation.org.
