Welcome to CarbManage.Earth!
This webspace is powered by the Wegener Center of the University of Graz on behalf of its Field of Excellence Climate Change Graz. It serves as an open platform to provide information and exchange on Carbon Management (CM), a new approach and related guidance and tools supporting everybody from public entities such as countries and states via institutions such as companies to families and individual persons to achieve Paris-compliant climate goals.
NEWS – 29 th April 2021: Release of the Wegener Center Research Brief “Carbon Management: a new approach to achieve Paris-compliant climate goals”, which provides the foundational introduction of CM. Read and download this Research Brief here (EN, Foreword & Executive Summary also DE) and watch the related Presentation Video (EN, for DE version switch to language DE). Find the Press Release here.
Welcome to join and become empowered to share in your climate solution path, in the spirit of the CM motto: CarbManage – carbsmart to Paris.
Have a look at the video about Carbon Management – June 2021. ©Uni Graz/Koppelhuber
What Carbon Management is – in a nutshell:
Carbon Management is a new solution framework for meeting the challenge of the Paris Agreement climate goals. This challenge of contributing towards limiting global warming to well below 2°C, with efforts to reach 1.5°C, is profound not only for international policy and whole countries worldwide but also at the sub-country institutional levels of organizations and companies as well as down to household, family, and individual person levels.
Together achieving the needed sustainable transformation to a low carbon and climate-friendly society, activity, and lifestyle in a fair and effective manner at all these public, institutional, and personal levels requires a professional solution-oriented approach to successfully implement one’s own portion of an overall successful climate change mitigation.
Carbon Management (CM) comes in to support actors at all these levels, and doing so comprehensively, in its three forms of Public Carbon Management (PCM), Institutional Carbon Management (ICM), and Personal Carbon Management (pCM). These share the general CM approach of helping actor entities estimate a reliable reference-year carbon budget (CMRB2020) and to pursue a successful low carbon transition in a sustainable way by adopting and implementing Paris-compliant decadal target budgets (e.g., CMDBs 2021-2030 and 2031-2040) and corresponding year-to-year carbon reduction target paths (CMTPs).
Along implementation each CM form ensures engaging all relevant actors in the needed action areas for achieving energy, mobility, resources, and stocks changes that lead to meet the targets. In this context both the entities’ actors (from single to multi-level) and action areas structure (action fields, subfields, emission groups), as well as relations to external actors and influences, are relevant as is a dynamical decision support workflow (CMDSflow). This workflow guides the whole CM process over its quarterly and year-to-year course while dynamically informing the actors, and enabling adaptive improvement, by achievement-vs-target feedbacks based on emissions monitoring and actors-based modeling.
Carbon Management is hence a joint framework helping at all action levels to take charge of one’s fair share in implementing a global climate solution that cannot wait: given the firm scientific knowledge available meanwhile on greenhouse gas emissions, global climate warming, and climate change impacts such as weather and climate extremes, we need to fully accept these physical climate change realities and proactively support the inevitable need for transforming to a low carbon society able to reach the Paris climate goals.
And an encouragement – if we can do it, you can do it!
We at the University of Graz, a research & higher education institution with about 4300 employees and 30000 students in Austria, don’t just conceive and further develop carbon management for others to better act but rather take it serious ourselves. As of 2020 we have started our own Institutional Carbon Management (ICM) implementation in-house and so we are field-testing the concepts and key tools of ICM ourselves in practice, in synergy with carrying our carbon management research along. Together with partners we also support Public Carbon Management (PCM) and facilitate innovative Personal Carbon Management (pCM) services.
Furthermore, for background information and motivation, we simultaneously developed and started the GCCI-Graz Climate Change Indicators Portal. This portal provides reliable recent-past monitoring information jointly with current-state nowcasting and Paris-compliant future projection information, over the critical timeframe from 1960 via 1990 and 2020 to 2050. In doing so it focuses on greenhouse gas emissions (GEM-GHG Emissions Monitoring), global climate warming (CWM-Climate Warming Monitoring), and climate change impacts in terms of weather and climate extremes (EWM-Extreme Weather Monitoring; released later in 2021).
By acting as such a role model and information source, we intend to serve as an innovative pioneer both in research and in practice. In this way we want to encourage and support also other entities at all levels (other public ones, but also private companies and organizations as well as individual persons and their networks) in achieving their Paris-compliant climate goals thanks to professional carbon management.
The webspace is open as of April 2021 and repeatedly updated – stay tuned.