This talk by Anna Agusti-Panareda (ECMWF) at the 1st CHE General Assembly presented an overview of the activities in Work Package 5. WP5 (Towards a Prototype of a European anthropogenic emission monitoring system), will integrate the research components from WP1 to WP4 with the aim of probing the elements of a future operational system. It will rely on results from the scientific work packages using a diversity of approaches to explore the different critical elements for the monitoring system, namely: bottom-up national inventories; value of observational infrastructure; and value of models and data assimilation algorithms. The exploration of the potential combination and synergy of the different approaches will guide the design of the components for a future operational prototype. Service element requirements for the future anthropogenic CO2 emission monitoring system will be assessed in terms of timeliness, cost/efficiency, maintenance/robustness and crucially the ability to achieve target accuracy of both the emissions themselves and their trends over many years.