Abstract
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories represent the link between national and international political actions on climate change, and climate and environmental sciences. Inventory agencies need to include, in national GHG inventories, emission and removal estimates based on scientific data following specific reporting guidance under the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, using the methodologies defined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines. Often however, research communities and inventory agencies have approached the problem of climate change from different angles and by using terminologies, metrics, rules and approaches that do not always match. This is particularly true dealing with “Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry” (LULUCF), the most challenging among the inventory sectors to deal with, mainly because of high level of complexity of its carbon dynamics and the difficulties in disaggregating the fluxes between those caused by natural and anthropogenic processes.In this paper, we facilitate the understanding by research communities of the current (UNFCCC) and future (under the Paris Agreement) reporting requirements, and we identify the main issues and topics that should be considered when targeting improvement of the GHG inventory.In relation to these topics, we describe where and how the research community can contribute to producing useful inputs, data, methods and solutions for inventory agencies and policy makers, on the basis of available literature. However, a greater effort by both communities is desirable for closer cooperation and collaboration, for data sharing and the understanding of respective and common aims.
Highlights
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories represent the link between national and international political ac tions on climate change, and climate and environmental sciences
The backbone of the Agreement is the Enhanced Transparency Framework, which comprises of a set of modalities, procedures and guidelines to estimate and report countries’ GHG fluxes, to track their progress towards achieving their individual National Deter mined Contributions (NDCs) targets, and to provide guidance on the kind of information that should be included in the NDC
While the general Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) inventory requirements are summarised in the supplementary material, here we focus on the issues that emerged from exchanges between the research community and the inventory agencies within the VERIFY project and from the analysis of existing literature
Summary
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. This concept is true within the context of climate policy, where the achievement of the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is dependent on the ability of the international community to accurately measure greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends and, to alter these trends. Several research approaches attempted to estimate GHG budgets of subnational territories (e.g., Lauvaux et al, 2008; Levin et al, 2011; Schuh et al, 2013; Wecht et al, 2014), cities (e.g., Kort et al, 2012; Breon et al, 2015; Lauvaux et al, 2016; Broquet et al, 2018) or industrial sites/ power plants (Nassar et al, 2017) While these scientific contributions play important roles in improving the collective knowledge on GHG fluxes and their measurement at local, national and global levels, in many cases they cannot be directly used for national GHG inventory purposes. It provides an overview of the current and future GHG reporting and verification requirements under the Paris Agreement, including the IPCC methods (in the supplementary mate rials), identifying how and where the research community can provide an effective contribution to support GHG inventory agencies and, towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement
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