The data generated by ICOS ocean stations supports multiple strands of international policy making. Inclusion within SOCAT means that they are used as one of the base data streams to support the annual evaluation of the state of the Global Carbon Cycle that is reported to the COP by the Global C Budget. This is the route by which policy makers could be alerted to key changes in the planetary cycling of carbon, such as for example a reduction in the ocean C sink which might necessitate an alteration of emission pathways to reach net zero goals.
In addition they can fulfil an important regional or national role. Obtaining good information on emissions that is needed to manage the pathway to net zero can either come from bottom up (essentially a national inventory of emissions produced according to a highly specified methodology) or top down (an estimate of flux derived from atmospheric observations). Top down methods are increasingly being recognised as important constraints over bottom up methods and likely to be particularly important for identifying the hard to mitigate methods.
These normally operate via an inversion system in which estimates of flux are derived from an atmospheric circulation model coupled to boundary fluxes at the margin of the domain considered. For coastal states the ocean has a clear importance in defining these prior emission estimates, but this importance is also high for landlocked countries. The ICOS marine data is thus useful for establishing a detailed pattern of emissions in your country that can be of assistance in managing your domestic transition to net zero. Currently there are individual estimates, and a pan European effort operated by COPERNICUS, however going forward is likely that this will be undertaken globally by the WMO.