The Urban Greenhouse Gas Conference and Stakeholder Summit 2025, hosted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), took place in Geneva, Switzerland from April 7 to 9. The event brought together scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders to share insights, showcase recent research, and work collaboratively on finalizing the draft of the IG3IS Urban Good Practice Guidelines.

Professor Gara Villalba, Principal Investigator of the URBAG project, served as chair and panel facilitator for Session 3: Opportunities to Resolve GHG Information Gaps. This session included presentations and a panel discussion focused on:

  • Strengthening emissions inventories for better accuracy

  • Developing innovative tools and methods for actionable GHG insights

  • Integrating urban-scale GHG data with broader atmospheric monitoring approaches

 

As part of the poster session, Qing Luo presented her research titled “High-Resolution Accounting for the Urban Biogenic CO₂ Emissions: Insights from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona.”

The study addresses a critical challenge in tackling the climate crisis: accurately quantifying biogenic CO₂ fluxes in urban areas. While governments increasingly implement green infrastructures (GIs) such as green roofs and urban parks to offset anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, current biosphere models—typically used at ecosystem scales with coarse spatial resolutions (10–100 km)—fail to capture the nuances of biospheric signals at urban scales (10 m–1 km).

Luo’s work applies a high-resolution (1 km) approach to estimate biogenic CO₂ fluxes across the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB). These fluxes are evaluated against atmospheric CO₂ mixing ratio observations from the AMB Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Network using the WRF-Chem atmospheric transport model in a passive tracer configuration.

The study offers valuable insights into how urban green areas contribute to the local carbon cycle, and provides a framework for improving carbon accounting methods. These results aim to support urban planners and policymakers in designing and implementing more effective green infrastructure strategies.

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