Overview

  1. About
  2. Overview

The North American Carbon Program (NACP) is a multi-agency, multidisciplinary scientific research program focused on carbon sources and sinks in North America and its adjacent oceans. NACP’s success relies on the coordination among observational, experimental, and modeling efforts regarding terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric, and human components of the carbon cycle. NACP draws upon a rich and diverse array of existing observational networks, monitoring sites, and experimental field studies. NACP is a primary activity of the US Carbon Cycle Science Program along with the US Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Program. While many NACP projects are supported by US federal agencies through intra- and extramural funding mechanisms, membership is not limited to US-funded participants and projects.

Develop quantitative scientific knowledge, robust observations, and models to determine the emissions and uptake of CO2, CH4, and CO, changes in carbon stocks, and the factors regulating these processes for North America and adjacent ocean basins.

Develop the scientific basis to implement full carbon accounting on regional and continental scales. This is the knowledge base needed to design monitoring programs for natural and managed CO2 sinks and emissions of CH4.

Support long-term quantitative measurements of fluxes, sources, and sinks of atmospheric CO2 and CH4, and develop forecasts for future trends.

The initial objectives and strategies for NACP were presented in the 2002 Science Plan and 2005 Implementation Plan. The NACP recently updated the Science Implementation Plan, refining the scientific questions, goals, and program elements.

  • How do natural processes and human actions affect the carbon cycle on land, in the atmosphere, and in the oceans?
  • How do policy and management decisions affect the levels of the primary carbon-containing gases, CO2 and CH4, in the atmosphere?
  • How are ecosystems, species, and natural resources impacted by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, the associated changes in climate, and by carbon management decisions?

  • Document past and current concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 and surface fluxes of CO2 and CH4, and provide clear and timely explanation of their variations and uncertainties.
  • Understand and quantify the socioeconomic drivers of carbon emissions, and develop transparent methods to monitor and verify those emissions.
  • Determine and evaluate the vulnerability of carbon stocks and flows to future climate change and human activity, emphasizing potential positive feedbacks to sources or sinks that make climate stabilization more critical or difficult.
  • Predict how ecosystems, biodiversity, and natural resources will interact with CO2 and climate change forcings to affect carbon cycling.
  • Examine a wide range of potential carbon management pathways that might be undertaken to achieve a low-carbon future, and determine their likelihood of ‘success’ and side effects.
  • Address decision maker needs for current and future carbon cycle information with relevant and credible data, projections, and interpretations.

  • Sustained and Expanded Observations: measuring surface biogenic and anthropogenic carbon exchanges, associated changes in carbon stocks, and their primary social, environmental, and ecological determinants. Observations support evaluation of trends and diagnosis of their drivers (causal factors). Observations also provide scientific data records needed to monitor the effectiveness of carbon policy and carbon management actions.
  • Assessment and Integration: producing key scientific data products and to develop analytical methods needed for synthesis and integration activities that bridge across scales and across disparate observations and disciplines. Assessment and integration activities advance core scientific understanding of contemporary carbon cycle trends and provide the basis for communicating these findings to broad audiences.
  • Processes and Attribution: uncovering mechanistic drivers of carbon cycle dynamics, including the processes that underlie their responses to societal and environmental changes. In doing so, it provides a process-oriented understanding of recent trends as well as the theoretical and empirical foundations for skillful predictions.
  • Prediction: developing and testing predictive understanding of the carbon cycle to identify and resolve processes missed or poorly represented in models, and then to apply improved models to generate insights into expected behaviors of the carbon cycle in the future as a dynamic and interactive component of the full Earth System.
  • Communication, Outreach, and Decision Support: facilitating clear and effective communication of current understandings of how the carbon cycle is responding to drivers now and how it will in the future, to reach diverse audiences including non-specialists. In addition, NACP seeks to develop decision support tools that aid private sector and public sector decision makers with exploring the impacts of policy and management options.

The NACP Science Leadership Group (SLG) provides scientific leadership for the NACP and is comprised of volunteers from the research community – from academia, research networks, federal research centers, NGOs, and the private sector. The NACP SLG interacts closely with the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) and the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Science Steering Group. The NACP SLG works with the NACP Office to coordinate the scientific activities of NACP’s components, working particularly closely with the NACP coordinator, who is a key interface between investigators, program elements, and the CCIWG, and provides overall program coordination. For more information, please review the SLG Charter.

The Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) is responsible for interagency coordination of U.S. carbon cycle science research. This entails coordinating research programs within and across agencies, coordinating the solicitation and review of research proposals (when appropriate), implementing targeted research, providing an interface with the scientific community conducting carbon cycle research, updating needs assessments, working to secure resources for new activities, and reporting results and accomplishments.