EU and Taiwan to establish joint climate monitoring project

The EU has joined forces with Taiwan to launch what has been described as the world's largest long-term monitoring project of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
 
News of the deal comes on the eve of ‘Green Week’, a major EU initiative designed to look at ways of combating global warming and meeting the world’s future energy needs.

Under the monitoring project, scheduled to begin in 2009, around six aircraft of the Taiwan-based China Airlines and several cargo ships will be equipped with sophisticated instruments that will collect atmospheric data during their flights and voyages

Professor Wang Kuo-ying, of Taiwan’s National Central University, who is in charge of the project, said, "The advantage of cooperating with commercial aircraft and shipping operators is that we can get regular and frequent data.”

He added that in the short term, the data can be used by scientists all over the world for meteorological predictions, and in the long run as data for research on global warming.

The instruments installed on the planes and ships are expected to collect information about the ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapor, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide, without affecting the operation of the craft.

Wang said, “This is another important contribution that Taiwan can make to the world in the domain of climate change.”

The EU has been doing research on atmospheric observation since 1994 but European aircraft are limited in the number and flight paths which has led to a deficiency in the monitoring system in the Pacific ocean.

It is hoped that Taiwan’s participation can make the monitoring network in the northern hemisphere “more complete.”

A spokesman for the commission said it was hoped the project could make a “significant” contribution in efforts to tackle the impact of climate change.

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