The work, partly co-funded by the CHE project, shows that the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the difficulty to keep track of CO2 emissions in real-time as no systems are in place to monitor global emissions in real time. Rather, emissions are reported as annual values which at times are provided years after the end of the calendar year. The paper makes use of a broad range of new data - including energy, activity and policy data - not traditionally used to track emissions to overcome this problem. This approach is unique and expands the way we think about monitoring with a potential impact on the future anthropogenic CO2 emissions monitoring and verification support capacity which is the focus of the CHE project.

The article is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x.