Introduction
As we experience the impact of our activities on climate change, we have started to promote actions to mitigate it. From changing laws and regulations to making environment-conscious decisions about our behaviour - what we eat, what we do for leisure or even career choices. However, how can we tell if all these actions are actually making a difference? Can we measure the progress of the “green transition” we pursue?
I am an environmental engineer, and I usually approach these questions from the technical side, so I focused on finding answers in science. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Andreas Ibrom and discuss these questions. He is a researcher at DTU who specialises in biometeorological and ecosystem research. I was particularly interested in his work in the ICOS project, a network of stations monitoring greenhouse gas emissions across Europe since one of the main metrics to evaluate our sustainability level is CO2 emissions. Professor Andreas has been working with such stations for several years, so I wanted to hear about his experience in measuring something as challenging as the green transition. I am very grateful to him for sharing his reflections and insights on how we perceive our agency for combating climate change, and why viewing our world as a connected system of ecosystems is essential to understand better our environment, and ourselves.
Phebe: “Hello Andreas, thank you very much for accepting the interview and sharing your experience. I have prepared some questions that I would like to discuss with you.”
Andreas: “Hi Phebe, thanks for inviting me to this discussion. It allows me to write down some relevant thoughts that have developed in recent years and hear what you and the readers think.”
The ICOS project
What is ICOS?
ICOS stands for “Integrated Carbon Observation System”. It is a distributed European research infrastructure. Its mission is to gather the scientific information necessary to understand the sources and sinks of atmospheric CO2 and the fate of other greenhouse gases and their controlling factors. ICOS created three networks covering the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems and oceans, and currently comprising nearly 200 operational stations. These stations are technical centres that develop, control the quality, synthesise and disseminate the data in near real-time, ensuring open access and fair use. Continuous data from several years is available, with measurements usually done at intervals of 30 minutes, some even at 10 Hz.
How did you get involved with the project?
ICOS is the result of many scientific developments, mainly in Europe and America. The ecosystem network started to form in the 1990s, with the development of a key method: eddy covariance. This monitoring method only requires a few devices mounted on a tower to enable us to observe the behaviour of entire ecosystems, including those as big as forests, 24/7, without affecting them.
This was my point of entry into the scientific community that focuses on gaseous fluxes. The fantastic feature of this community was, and still is, the complete trust in collaboration. Data and knowledge sharing generates added value, which exceeds the potential of individuals by several orders of magnitude.
The first network of that kind was a European project: EUROFLUX. I was lucky to get involved as an associated partner because our group at the University of Göttingen (Germany) had some early experience building eddy covariance systems. The key was a presentation of our first results at the scientific union, now called the European Geosciences Union (EGU), in 1996. That is when I got to know the later coordinator of the EUROFLUX network, Riccardo Valentini. He invited me to take part in the development of the project. There I also met my Danish colleagues from the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. One of them was Kim Pilegaard, whose working group I joined 8 years later.
Main Activities and Key Roles
What activities do you carry out?
Together with a group of three experienced field technicians, I run two ecosystem stations of ICOS, class one. The first site is Lille Bøgeskov (which we call Sorø to ease communication), and the second one is a biomass plantation at the DTU-Risø campus, where we have observed CO2 exchange since 2012. Being a principal investigator (PI) involves mainly motivating the team, providing and sharing knowledge, and injecting energy into the backbone of the group, assuring that we do the measurements and deliver the data in the quality and amount agreed upon. We measure more than 100 variables with automated systems and provide the data in the early morning of the next day to the carbon portal, where the data is made available to users right away. We also look together into the results, at least once a week, to identify any malfunction and see which maintenance efforts and manual measurements are due to be taken. These are, e.g. taking hemispheric photos to quantitatively document the forest canopy structure (leaf area and status of individual tree crowns), taking samples for chemical analyses, and measuring tree trunks, the biomass of the forest floor vegetation and litter production. All these measurements are well-defined in protocols and instructions standardised across the ICOS stations so that the data from different locations is comparable.
Another important function of a PI is to secure long-term funding, which is challenged by the usual project-based strategy of research funding councils and agencies. It is difficult to explain why an observation network creates novel research very efficiently, even compared to single bold and high-risk/high-gain individual research projects. Despite the great and generous support from my home university institute (DTU-Sustain), there are always good and bad years. The fact that we have been able to run the Beech Forest station for almost 30 years now was and is based on outstanding personal commitments, especially of our field technicians despite the scarce funding conditions.
The ICOS project stands as a powerful example of how long-term scientific collaboration and observation can help us better understand the dynamics of our changing climate. Through the dedication of researchers like Professor Andreas and their teams, we are gathering vital data that can guide our actions toward a more sustainable future. However, while we've learned much about the ICOS network and the critical work involved in monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, the question remains: Can we truly measure the progress of the “green transition” we pursue?
Stay with us for next week’s article, where we will dive deeper into the key findings from the ICOS project and explore whether the data collected can help us answer that pivotal question.