2. Aims

2. AIMS

The aim is for Air Emissions '94, and its successors to become:

• the European emission inventory.

This would remove the need for other inventories. This raises a number of issues particularly the relationship of the IPCC and UNECE source descriptions and relationships with bodies collecting statistics such as EUROSTAT and the OECD

The main aim of the EEA is to provide information to policy makers - DGXI and member states. This needs to be objective, reliable and comparable. It is not just a ‘stamp-collecting’ exercise - data needs to be collected, interpreted, made available and presented in useful and timely ways.

To be successful Air Emissions '94 must meet as many of the needs of the user community as possible. When it meets those needs, it can become the European inventory.

The Emissions Inventory Topic Centre needs to first produce a methodology and then collect the data to produce a European inventory.

Ultimately the Emissions Inventory Topic Centre should be able to supply the data required by international agreements, for example the FCCC and the EU greenhouse gas reporting requirements. (These are discussed in Section 5.3.) The data collected for Air Emissions '94 should as far as possible be compatible with these agreements. The earliest requirement is for provisional data within seven months (CO₂ for the EU) — a deadline on a much shorter time-scale than CORINAIR 90 has been able to deliver. These agreements also determine a minimum level of data that countries should be able to provide.

The emission inventory data that is collected will be used in a number of ways. It will need to:

• show trends and provide the basis of strategic analysis.
• provide the basis of a single system for both emission inventories and for emission projections and scenario analysis.
• need to be compatible with waste and water inventories which, in the future, will lead to the creation of integrated inventories.
• in addition provide the basis of any attempt to model air quality in Europe.

This implies that a national level inventory must be produced each year.

The Topic Centre must rely on national experts to produce inventories for their own countries. These should be compatible with the EMEP/CORINAIR Guidebook on Emissions Inventories and any divergence must be fully documented. Software will be available to assist this work. In all cases the Topic Centre will validate inventories and ensure compatibility between countries’ inventories, thus assuring the quality of the data.