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).

CHE partner University of East Anglia led an international team that has published a new article in the journal Nature Climate Change, outlining that the COVID-19 global lockdown has had an “extreme” effect on daily carbon emissions, but it is unlikely to last.

With the start of 2020 the CO2 Human Emission (CHE) project has entered its final 12 months of coordinated developments across its 22 partners institutes. The work has reached several important milestones that prepare "the baton" for the run into the next phase of development in 2021-2023, guided by the European Commission's CO2 Task Force strategy (see the CO2 reports) that will move us closer to operational monitoring targets.