Chapter 5 Climate Research

WCRP Activities > Global Carbon Project (GCP)

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) is being carried out collaboratively between IGBP, WCRP and IHDP. Australian scientists have played leading roles in its development, and the Coordinating Office for GCP is in the CSIRO Earth Observation Centre.

The goal of the GCP is to develop comprehensive, policy-relevant understanding of the global carbon cycle, encompassing its natural and human dimension and their interactions. This is being addressed through three themes: (1) patterns and variability (the current geographical and temporal distributions of the major stores and fluxes in the global carbon cycle), (2) processes and interactions (the control and feedback mechanisms - both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic - that determine the dynamics of the carbon cycle), and (3) management of the carbon cycle (the points of intervention and windows of opportunity that exist for human societies to manage this system).

The GCP is implementing its research agenda through collaborative efforts with national and international carbon programs and funding agencies, and by leading a limited number of difficult and highly interdisciplinary new research initiatives. Key products from the ten-year research program (now in its second year) will be (1) improved knowledge of the coupled carbon-climate-human system, with increased capacity to quantify, attribute and predict, through a systemic framework and linked models of the coupled biophysical and human interactions controlling the carbon cycle, (2) better understanding of the carbon consequences of regional development pathways, through linked regional studies in both developing and developed regions, (3) better coordination, linkage and information exchange among national and international carbon research and monitoring programs, and (4) outreach and communication products.