Oceans expert Dr Bakker to attend COP26

A number of climate experts from the University of East Anglia will be attending the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Their areas of expertise range from the impact of climate change on biodiversity, climate geoengineering and carbon removal, to the impact of climate change on sovereign credit ratings, carbon uptake by the oceans, and gender and climate change.

Dr Dorothee Bakker will attend the first week of COP26 as part of the Integrated Carbon Observation System European Infrastructure Consortium (ICOS ERIC).

Her areas of research and expertise cover processes affecting the air-sea transfer of natural long-lived greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) and the marine carbon cycle in a changing climate.

Dr Bakker chairs the SOCAT global group - SOCAT is a Global Ocean Observing System, with more than 100 contributors.

Her brief: The ocean takes up a quarter of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. This uptake varies over time (between years and decades) for reasons that we do not fully understand. It is unclear how ocean CO₂ uptake will respond when we move towards net zero. Measurements of (surface) ocean CO₂ and their synthesis are therefore key for determining ocean CO₂ uptake, now and in the future. However, funding for these measurements and their synthesis is precarious.

Dr Bakker is currently investigating carbon cycling in UK shelf seas and the Southern and Arctic Oceans.

She is a co-author of this year’s Global Carbon Budget paper (for SOCAT synthesis of ocean CO₂ measurements).