A UN-led plan to tackle climate change by radically improving the way heat-trapping atmospheric pollutants are measured all over the planet, is being given serious consideration by governments and the international scientific community, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday.

The WMO initiative would create a network of ground-based measurement stations that can verify worrying air quality data that’s been flagged by satellites or airplanes, potentially in the next five years.

“At present, there is no comprehensive, timely international exchange of surface and space-based greenhouse gas observations,” the UN agency said, as it urged “improved (international) collaboration” and data exchange to support the 2015 Paris Agreement, which provides a roadmap for reduced carbon emissions and climate resilience.

“It’s not just anthropogenic emissions (that will be monitored), but what the forests are doing, what the oceans are doing,” said Dr. Oksana Tarasova, a Senior Scientific Officer at WMO. “We need this information to support our mitigations, because we have no time to lose.”

In 2022, Dr. Tarasova continued, WMO reported the largest-ever observed increase of methane “and the reasons of this increase are still not known, so one of the functions of this new proposed infrastructure would be to help fill in the gaps which we have in our knowledge regarding the observations and regarding the use of these observations.”