5. Other Considerations for Future European Emissions Inventories

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

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)

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.