BenchFlux: Scale-aware Benchmarks for Nature-based Climate Solutions Using Flux Measurements and Earth Observations

Society faces the urgent challenge of developing sustainable, equitable, and scalable solutions to climate change, driven by the critical need for evidence-based management of geo-ecological life support systems like carbon, water, and heat. To address this need, we will develop scale-aware benchmarks for land carbon sequestration by leveraging atmospheric CO2 flux ground truth data alongside a wide range of in-situ and remotely sensed earth observations. We will provide an independent, impartial and actionable benchmark with uncertainty estimates to link activity-based bottom-up inventories and top-down atmospheric concentration inversions. This benchmark is essential for accurate global-to-ownership-level carbon accounting, and unlocking the development and improvement of effective nature-based climate solutions. Our project will initiate a paradigm shift from the current practice of scale-agnostic data joins to a scale-aware methodology from local to global levels. This new machine learning benchmark will maximize the use of scarce flux ground truth observations, consistently integrate multi-source earth observations, increase statistical power, and reconcile flux estimates across scales.