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5. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS FOR FUTURE EUROPEAN EMISSION INVENTORIES


5.1 Pollution Emission Registers

Some states are setting up pollution registers. These contain information on many individual emission sources. These would appear to be a valuable source of data, particularly for some sectors e.g. industry and power generation, and for some pollutants, e.g. SO2, NMVOC and N2O . Unfortunately they are unlikely to be able to deliver much assistance before the first deadlines imposed on this process by the international reporting requirements. However they may be able to do this in time for the data to be included within two years.


5.2 New Pollutants

There are already requirements laid down by UNECE to extend the pollutants to be considered to include heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in 1996. This will have to be included in any inventory system now as they will require a number of alterations to the source sectors. Most of the emissions of pollutants already included are emitted by fuel combustion or agriculture. These additional pollutants also come from sources such as metal processing, waste disposal and pest control. It will also be necessary to consider the implications of including the new pollutants required by the IPCC (HFCs, PFCs and SF6).


5.3 National and International Obligations

Any European inventory system needs to comply with both the international reporting requirements and to national requirements. Clearly it will be easier if they coincide but this may not be the case. Box 5 gives examples of national and international obligations in some European countries.

Box 5 National and International Obligations in European Countries

The UK has no formal national legislation that enforces the production of emission estimates. However, it is a policy that national emission estimates should be produced and published within one year. The UK will produce emission inventories to meet the requirements of any international agreements to which it is a party. The production of spatially disaggregated inventories has a lower priority.

A broadly similar situation exists in France, where national emissions estimates are produced every year, and emissions inventories are provided for international agreements. Few resources are available for the production of regional inventories.

The situation in Denmark is similar to that in the UK.

Netherlands has a system which involves visiting each plant in the country and agreeing emission estimates with the plant. The approach is based on consensus and so each plant must agree with its emission estimate. This is performed every four years but there are plans to increase this frequency.

Countries in Europe have committed themselves to supplying data under various international agreements. These agreements define a minimum availability of emissions data. The timing of these arrangements is shown below in Table 8.

Table 8 - International Reporting Deadlines

I - Initial data
R - Revised data and revisions to earlier years
D - Data and revisions to earlier years
* - Reporting deadlines not yet specified

In addition to the EMEP request for data by 31st December, the UNECE Strategies and Policies Working Group are requesting provisional data by 1st June. All of these deadlines are for national total data split by source sector. They do not require spatial disaggregation. The source sectors required are laid down in the reporting requirements. In addition, EMEP requires a spatial disaggregation every four years. This would coincide with CORINAIR 90 and AE 94.

Table 8, together with table 3, result in a priority list of data outputs that are required. These would, in time order, be:

  • National Total CO2 data within the first six months after the end on the year. This would fulfill the EU CO2 reporting requirement. This data could be in any format.
  • National Total emissions for SO2 , NOx, CO, NMVOC, NH3 and CH4 within one year. These are needed by the 11 UNECE/CORINAIR source sector groups. In practice CO2 and N2O could be added to this list as they will require little extra effort. Most of the relevant activity statistics will be collected to estimate the other pollutants.
  • Remaining data. This includes other pollutants and the more detailed spatial data. As the detailed spatial data is not required every year this could be only done when required, or, as suggested below, only done in a detailed way every few years and estimated from the national total data to fill in the gaps.

The LCP data are already being reported to the EU from member states. There would be no need to be involved in that process or alter it in any way. However that information would be very important in compiling the national totals and so would be an important input into the national totals and spatial disaggregations being produced after they become available.

Table 7 (in Section 4) summarised the IPCC and CORINAIR sectors for the UK. A software tool has been developed to transfer data from the CORINAIR 90 system to the IPCC reporting format. The EU reporting requires this detail for CO2 only. This data should be collected and distributed within seven months. Countries that are not in the EU do not have to supply data under the EU greenhouse gas reporting requirements and therefore do not have to meet the 7 month deadline.

Data supplied to UNECE by 21 September 1994 is shown below in Table 9. This shows there is a wide variation in the ways countries report their data to UNECE. However it does show that a number of countries can report both CO2 and SO2 within nine months (many of these will be provisional data). It is interesting to note that of the four EEA countries that have produced 1993 estimates in 1994 three of them, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom use their own database systems. France uses a system based on CORINAIR 90. The Netherlands (which has reported 1993 SO2) also has its own database system. The Topic Centre should not interfere with countries which have systems that are meeting reporting deadlines.

Table 9 also clearly shows which countries may have problems in submitting data on a tight timetable. It is not clear why countries that have SO2 estimates have not produced CO2 estimates. The majority of the emissions are likely to be from fuel use and that data is required for the SO2 estimates.

Table 9 Emission Estimates Supplied to UNECE for 1993

Received by 21 September 1994 (data sorted by year of latest CO2 data)

  Sulphur Dioxide Carbon Dioxide
  Latest Year of data Emission (kTonnes as SO2) Number of UNECE source categories reported Latest Year of data Emission (MTonnes as C)  
Bulgaria 1993 1100 7 1993 72 CO2 data
within 12
months
France 1993 1136 9 1993 377
Norway 1993 37 7 1993 36
Slovenia 1993 182 4 1993 13
Sweden 1993 103 7 1993 62
United Kingdom 1993 3069 8 1993 545
Canada 1993 3042 n 1992 468 CO2 data
within 24
months
Netherlands 1993 168 7 1992 172
Austria 1992 76 5 1992 57
Czech Republic 1992 1538 6 1992 148
Denmark 1992 189 6 1992 57
Hungary 1992 827 6 1992 66
Romania 1992 559 6 1992 198
Russian Federation 1992 3839 2 1992 1630
Slovakia 1992 378 6 1992 50
Ireland 1992 160 6 1991 32 CO2 data
within 36 months
Germany 1991 4441 6 1991 975
Finland 1992 139 6 1990 55 CO2 data
within 48
months
United States 1992 20621 7 1990 4400
Italy 1990 2251 7 1990 520
Portugal 1990 284 n 1990 38
Spain 1990 2316 7 1990 218
Ukraine 1993 2194 n     No CO2 data
Switzerland 1993 58 8    
Cyprus 1993 43 5    
Poland 1992 2820 n    
Belgium 1992 311 n    
Liechtenstein 1990 0.1 n    
Greece 1990 510 (4 in 1985) 1989 72
Croatia 1990 160 n    
Belarus 1989 596 n    
Turkey 1985 354 n    
Luxembourg 1985 16 n    
Iceland 1985 6 n    

Note:

Highlighted countries are members of the EEA. Several countries have specified their 1993 estimates as preliminary or provisional. These are Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

n indicates that the data was not in the requested UNECE source sectors.

Source: ‘1994 Major Review on Strategies and Policies for Air Pollution Abatement Tables and Figures’, UNECE Document EB.AIR/R.87/Add.1, 21/9/94.

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