LULUCF MRV - Analysis and proposals for enhancing Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of greenhouse gases from Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry in the EU

Abstract

The land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector is a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory sector that covers the emissions of GHGs from and their removal by terrestrial carbon stocks, living biomass, dead organic matter and soil organic carbon according to six main anthropogenic land use categories: Forest land, Cropland, Grassland, Wetlands, Settlements, and Other land. According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all Parties shall periodically report an update inventory of anthropogenic emissions and removals of GHGs using comparable methodologies provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Parties are also required to report and account for such emissions under the Kyoto Protocol (KP). These emission inventories are then factored into an international reduction target commitment. In recent years, international negotiations have resulted in the adoption of new rules for the second commitment period of the KP (CP2: 2013-2020), e.g. mandatory accounting of Forest management. Furthermore, Decision 529/2013/EU goes beyond the international UNFCCC negotiations by adding the mandatory accounting of Cropland management and Grassland management. All these changes pose new challenges that Member States (MS) will need to address from 2015 (i.e. the start of the CP2 reporting period). This report describes the actions undertaken in the context of the JRC’s “LULUCF MRV” (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification) Administrative Arrangement with DG CLIMA, through a sequence of tasks (described in detail in the Annexes). The aim of the AA is to support MS in improving the quality and comparability of their LULUCF reporting during CP2, in line with IPCC methods and the new UNFCCC and EU rules. .