Verifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Methods to Support International Climate Agreements

As a reference work on compilation, monitoring and verification of emission inventories on global scale, this book provides emission inventory scientists with a comprehensive literature overview. Moreover anybody can download it free of charge fromwww.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12883. A prerequisite for an international assessment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories is a list of clear definitions, for which this report chose the UNFCCC standard terms and summarized them in a clarifying box in the introductory chapter. Not only methods but also uncertainties are addressed with an exhaustive list of references. This book can significantly contribute to re-assess the scientific robustness behind the UNFCCC rules for emission inventorying, as they are applied by the roster experts reviewing the national reports. To each of the relevant GHG emission inventory topics a separate chapter is dedicated: (i) national inventory reports, (ii) land-use sources/sinks fluxes and (iii) atmospheric and oceanic measurements and inverse modelling. All three chapters describe the technical/scientific details for GHG emissions inventory assessments concisely and provide references for the reader to allow further investigation. Chapter 2 on national inventory reports familiarizes the reader with the framework and current practices for developing the National Inventories/Communications of GHG emissions. International sector-specific reporting is synthesized such that it presents an overview on the contribution of each sector and on the lead of data gathering institutions and research centres. Often the national systems behind GHG inventories are not fully appreciated because the efforts improving accuracy and decreasing uncertainty are overshadowed by problems of consistency and the 1990 global base year. An overlooked issue is the generally low comparability of national estimates caused by the unharmonized use of different methods and proxy definitions. The report tends to underestimate the potential for reporting with default data for non Annex I countries in the short term. Instead, near-term measures that should be taken as capacity building in developing countries including associated costs, further extension of independent verification of ‘self-reported’ emissions data, as well as assessment and means to reduce the uncertainties are highlighted. Recommendations are given mainly on extending the inventory reporting and reviewing to all UNFCCC parties, on improving methods and on facilitating cross-comparisons of ‘self-reported’ data with data derived from other monitoring sources. Support to IPCC, UN, IEA and FAO to improve their statistics is thereby underlined. Chapter 3 addresses agriculture, land use and forestry activities, focusing mainly on the situation in the USA, and does not assess the experience achieved by other Annex I parties or international organizations to address also global land cover changes. The method proposed of combined statistical sampling and remote sensing seems indeed the most appropriate for LULUCF GHG inventories on land remaining in the same category, but more might be needed for detecting conversions. Relatively large uncertainties (above 10% to be realistic) and difficulties in reporting small pools are to be anticipated. Harmonization opportunities (of definitions, and computational methods) could have been pointed out as a great potential to achieve a complete and consistent global dataset. The list of international efforts could include not only the NASA-sponsored FluxNet network, but also the EU FP6 and FP7 research projects such as NitroEurope and CarboEurope on the nitrogen and carbon cycles. Chapter 4 provides an overview of the potential and limitations of using atmospheric measurements and inverse modelling for verification of ‘self-reported’ (‘bottom-up’) emission inventories. This chapter focuses mainly on CO2, which is clearly the most important anthropogenic GHG but at the same time probably the most difficult one for verification by