But when both sides met in Copenhagen for global climate talks, they were farther apart than anyone had anticipated; the U.S. sought an agreement that would require all countries to permit international verification of their climate-change efforts, and China balked.
Several Swedish and Norwegian stakeholders were engaged in this joint project to understand driving forces and obstacles and provide key insights for the successful implementation of such verification framework for evaluation of climate impact from alternative design options.
Iterative planning: Monitoring, reporting and verification is already an integral part of climate change mitigation approaches, and countries need similar systematic ways to appraise how climate adaptation investments contribute to development objectives.
Even in the case of Muller's recent verification of the findings from existing climate models, "we're still not published yet," Muller says.
Although environmental groups have expressed some disappointment, they have largely cast the talks as a critical step forward, citing an American pledge to raise $100 billion for poor nations coping with the impacts of climate change and China's concession to allow verification of its carbon emissions.
Assessing the effect of climate change on carbon sequestration in tropical forest ecosystems is important to inform monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) for reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), and to effectively assess forest management options under climate change.
But it says that overall the accord was a "step forward", noting progress on a consensus to limit global warming within 2C, progress on the funding by rich nations of climate change adaptation measures in poorer nations and a "last minute" compromise by developing nations on the verification of their carbon pledges.
Set aside the issue of climate change.
Another year, another set of climate records.
It's because of climate change.
