From Individual Observations to Global Assessments: Tracing the Marine Carbon Knowledge Value Chain

Marine carbon observations (MCOs) provide essential data to trace historical and current changes in marine carbon storage and fluxes that ultimately feed into the Global Carbon Budget and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Therefore, MCOs play a key role in informing global climate policy as well as ocean governance. However, they only achieve this potential if multiple sources of observations are combined and analyzed jointly. This implies an immense coordination effort by the international MCO community which developed, e.g., joint standards for the collection of (meta‐)data, quality control processes, data platforms, etc. This article traces the value chain of MCOs, concretely for CO2, from data collection to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Based on an interdisciplinary research project, the study illuminates which structures and practices the marine carbon community has developed to integrate different observations and measurement technologies, starting from German research institutes and agencies and expanding to the European and international networks to which they contribute. Combining a social network analysis with qualitative insights from in‐depth interviews, the article identifies key information providers and brokers and pinpoints systemic vulnerabilities, e.g., where connections between observation networks or data platforms are maintained based on personal relationships or ad‐hoc interactions rather than automated data submissions, or where temporally limited third party funding threatens the continued existence of the observation network.