USRA's Tomohiro Oda Appointed to National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Consensus Study Committee

COLUMBIA, Md., June 30, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Tomohiro Oda, Senior Scientist at Universities Space Research Association's (USRA) Earth from Space Institute, was recently appointed to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Consensus Study Committee on the "Development of a Framework for Evaluating Global Greenhouse Emissions Information for Decision Making."

This ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (Chaired by Dr. Donald J. Wuebble; Staff officer, Dr. Rachel Silvern) will develop a framework to evaluate global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) information to support decision making.

"This Consensus Study will allow us to identify the key challenges in monitoring GHG in support of climate monitoring, mitigation, and decision making," said Dr. Oda, who oversees USRA's GHG emissions modeling and monitoring activities. He added, "I am excited about joining the Consensus Study committee and working with the experts."

The objectives of the Consensus Study are to: 

• Describe approaches used to develop global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories.
• Discuss the potential uses and limitations of these approaches. 
• Provide a framework to evaluate emissions information and inventories, including guidance for policy makers about their use in decision making.
• Present several case studies to demonstrate how the framework could be applied to evaluate emissions information and inventory approaches and identify strengths and opportunities for improvement for each case study.
• To the extent possible, identify ways to improve methodological transparency, sustainability and continuity of relevant observations, and product confidence in global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions inventories.

This "Fast-track" Consensus Study is being conducted on an accelerated timeline in order to inform discussions at the 27^th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Last year at COP26 in Glasgow, UK, USRA was formally accepted by UNFCCC as an Observer, and Dr. Oda led USRA's very first delegation to COP. "I am excited to go back to the COP meeting this year and am honored to represent USRA again in impactful discussions," said Dr. Oda.

The Consensus Study Committee was formed in late May, and the first workshop for information gathering was held early this month.  The second workshop is underway.  The Consensus Study will result in a framework for evaluating emissions inventories and information and include several case studies for how such a framework could be applied in practice to specific sector- or country-based emissions inventories. 

Members of the committee include:

Donald J. Wuebbles (Chair), Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois, and Director of Climate Science for Earth Knowledge

Kamaljit S. Bawa, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Founder-President of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, India

Gabrielle B. Freyfus, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), Washington, DC and Paris, and an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University

Annemarie Elderling, Project Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (retired)

Fiji C. George, Senior Director, Climate and Sustainability, at Cheniere Energy

Heather Dawn Graven, a Reader in the Department of Physics and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, UK

Kevin Gurney, Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University

Angel Hsu, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and the Environment, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tomohiro Oda, Senior Scientist, Universities Space Research Association

Irène-Xueref-Remy, a Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU) and she directs research programs at the Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and marine and continental Ecology (IMBE) at Aix-en-Provence. 

Rachel Silvern—Staff Officer

Founded in 1969, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the U.S. Government, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) is a nonprofit corporation chartered to advance space-related science, technology, and engineering. USRA operates scientific institutes and facilities, and conducts other major research and educational programs. USRA engages the university community and employs in-house scientific leadership, innovative research and development, and project management expertise. More information about USRA is available at www.usra.edu. 

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SOURCE Universities Space Research Association