A very successful CHE final review on 26 January and a very productive CoCO2 kick-off meeting on 27/28 January marked the beginning of 2021 in an important European CO2 week. The CHE project, coordinated by Gianpaolo Balsamo (ECMWF), ran from October 2017 to December 2020, and successfully delivered all anticipated outputs in good state and on time. All CHE deliverable reports are now online. Its follow-on is CoCO2, coordinated by Richard Engelen (ECMWF), which started in January 2021 and will continue until December 2023. Both projects support the development of the CO2 emission monitoring prototype that will be implemented as an important new Copernicus Service element.

The CO2 Human Emissions (CHE) project has produced a new global simulation that realistically illustrates the variability of CO2 in the atmosphere. It will assist research studies focusing on the monitoring of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in support of the Paris Agreement.

The CHE and VERIFY projects successfully held their Joint General Assembly 2020 in a virtual meeting format and all presentations are now available online. More than 100 participants, with peaks up to 130, joined the 5 sessions distributed over a 3-day online meeting from 7 to 9 July 2020. Presentations and discussions during the Joint General Assembly documented the progress in understanding of anthropogenic aspects of the full carbon cycle and the developments towards a Copernicus anthropogenic CO2 emissions monitoring & verification support capacity, for which an earlier workshop organised by the European Commission had outlined the European vision (see Workshop on monitoring anthropogenic-CO2 emissions using Copernicus).