Dr. Masayuki Konto

Masayuki Kondo is an associate professor at the IDEC Institute, Hiroshima University. He has been a leading scientist in the greenhouse gas budget assessment study under the international project,  REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes 2 (RECCAP2), since 2018.

With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in High Energy Particle Physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, Kondo pursued a brief career in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) before pursuing a career in Geophysical research. He earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Hokkaido University, Japan.

His research aims to assess reliable greenhouse gas budgets at regional and global scales using terrestrial ecosystem models, atmospheric inversions, including GOSAT CO2/CH4 inversions, and empirical upscaling of greenhouse gas fluxes from eddy flux observations, and to provide insight into prospects of biogeochemical cycles of Earth. To date, Kondo has produced achievements, including identifying the significant sink-source change in the Southeast Asian CO2 budget between decades and the role of plant regrowth in the recent enhancement of terrestrial CO2 uptake.

Currently, his research focuses on filling a gap between carbon budgets from ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches, particularly in tropical regions. Also, he is leading a synthesis of global and regional carbon budget assessments from multiple approaches and processes, aiming to contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).