  The goal of climate change governance is to stabilize greenhouse gas
concentrations. This requires the reduction of anthropogenic global net
emissions. In the pursuit of such a reduction, knowledge of greenhouse gas
sources and sinks is critical to define baselines, and assess the effectiveness
of climate governance over time. Such information and the means to
independently verify its credibility continue to remain out of reach including
in the recent Paris agreement. This essay argues that to make real progress in
mitigating future climate change, this status quo must be challenged both
intellectually and practically. First, it proposes to acknowledge and address
the inconsistency between the objectives of a climate regime and the role of
transparency as a mean to achieve these objectives. It does so by redefining
transparency as the addition of publicity and measurability, which turns it
into a credible information generating mechanism for governance. Second, it
shows how in practice, a global monitoring system of greenhouse gas net
emissions, based on this new definition of transparency and designed as a
global public good, could provide the necessary knowledge to help frame
governance solutions by providing both credibility and completeness in
understanding the scope of the problem to solve.
