Greenhouse Gas Emission Accounting 2. Update including Second National Communications

It covers the greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. The report was produced at the request of the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment. The quality of emission inventories became important after the adoption of legally binding assigned emission reductions for a group of six greenhouse gases in the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Convention.

This report describes a number of ways to estimate the quality and uncertainty of national greenhouse gas emission inventories. Measuring concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be concluded to be not the only independent method for verifying inventories since measurements and atmospheric models also contain errors and uncertainties. Comparisons with semi-independent inventories on national, regional and global scales can provide more insight into the quality of the inventories. Analysis showed that national inventories from industrialised countries, as reported in the National Communications, are not transparent. Compliance to the Kyoto Protocol cannot be reviewed on the basis of this information alone.

Recommendations provide for a more detailed standard format for reporting national inventories.A review for the Kyoto Protocol can thus be made on the basis of similar information from all industrialised countries. Precise and complete information on emissions from non-Annex-I countries is still missing. A lack of statistics on long-term trends and a lack of country-specific emission factors make national inventories from these countries incomplete and inaccurate, especially for agriculture, forestry and land-use change. Energy statistics could also be much improved.