Access to reliable and readily available estimates of the consequence of different land use and management practices on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a prerequisite for successful implementation of land use-based GHG mitigation strategies. Moreover, this information is needed at the level at which management decisions are actually made – at the field scale – and thus information systems must be straightforwardly and universally available, usable by non-experts, state-of-the-art technology based and easily aggregated to larger scales.
COMET-Global aims to develop and deploy a state-of-the-art system for full greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, operational at the scale of an individual entity (e.g., farm, livestock operation). The system will be web-based, free and accessible to anyone having an internet connection.
An important goal of the consortium will be to disseminate and promote the uptake of the COMET-Global system, including engagement and outreach to farmer organisations, environmental groups, governmental agencies and other stakeholders in each of the partner countries, as well as other researchers working on GHG mitigation in the land use sector.
The system development will leverage an existing comprehensive web-based tool, COMET-Farm, operational in the United States. In addition to implementing spatial data (climate, soil, land management) and country-specific emission factors and methods for non-soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it will incorporate two widely used process-based models, RothC and ECOSSE, along with the DayCent model for estimating soil GHG emissions. The user interface will have multi-lingual capabilities (English, French, Spanish, German and Italian) for the multinational user community convenience.
Key attributes of the system:
*At the time of the proposal. Please consider this data as an accurate estimate; it may vary during the project’s lifespan.
Total costs include in kind contribution by grant holders and can therefore be higher than the total requested funding.