11. Capacity Development on GHG Inventories in Asia

The 5th Assessment Report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 stated that “the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O) have all increased since 1750 due to human activity”.

In accordance with Articles 4 and 12 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all Parties to the Convention are required to submit greenhouse gas inventories to the Conference of the Parties (COP) under the convention as part of their national communications (NCs) at a frequency determined by the COP.

GHG inventories are important for ensuring the transparency and accuracy of each country’s mitigation actions by quantifying anthropogenic GHG emissions. In this respect, national GHG inventories, which provide information on the GHG emissions and their trends over time, play a critical role as a basis for decisionmakers to design and implement strategies for mitigation actions and GHG emission reductions within their country.

Inventories form the basis of national policy development because they can be used to:

Inventories are essential to monitoring of impacts of mitigation policies and measures because:

Only developed countries, which are the main emitters of greenhouse gas, have climate change responsibilities and are mandated to create and submit GHG inventories periodically. However, recently, developing countries have achieved rapid growth, and the emissions of greenhouse gas caused thereby have significantly increased, which means developing countries will also have to start submitting GHG inventories. It is thus necessary for each country to urgently asses its national circumstances.

Since the Bali Action Plan, which states that Non-Annex I Parties should also take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner, was agreed on at COP13 in 2007, the importance of greenhouse gas inventories has been recognised as a tool for supporting the developing mitigation measures and to verify their efficacy. From the Cancun Agreements, Non-Annex I Parties shall make the biennial update report every 2 years (see Table 11.1).

The Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO) was established in July 2002 in the Center for Global Environmental Research (CGER) at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES). Its mission is to compile the annual national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory of Japan; to implement various GHG inventory-related tasks and activities, such as providing support and assistance for the technical review of the national GHG inventory of Japan for the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol; and to contribute to capacity building of Asian countries in developing and improving their GHG inventories (see Table 11.2).

The “National GHGs Inventory Report of JAPAN (NIR)” and “GHGs Emissions Data of Japan”, both of which are published annually, as well as information on and reports from the “Workshop on Greenhouse Gas Inventories in Asia (WGIA)” are available and posted on the GIO website.

Additionally, some members join the process of the technical review of other parties for the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol in some countries such as Germany as a member of the expert review team (ERT).

The Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MoEJ), with the cooperation of relevant ministries, agencies and organisations, prepares Japan’s national inventory and compiles supplementary information required under Article 7.1, which is annually submitted to the Conference of the Parties through the UNFCCC Secretariat in accordance with the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol.

The MoEJ takes overall responsibility for the national inventory and therefore does its utmost to improve the quality thereof. The MoEJ organised the “Committee for the Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimation Methods” in order to integrate the latest scientific knowledge into the inventory and to ensure it reflects recent international provisions. The estimation of GHG emissions and removals, the key category analysis and the uncertainty assessment are then carried out by taking the decisions of the committee into consideration. Substantial activities, such as the estimation of emissions and removals and the preparation of Common Reporting Formats (CRF) and National Inventory Report (NIR), are performed by the Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), which belongs to the Center for Global Environmental Research of the National Institute for Environmental Studies. The relevant ministries, agencies and organisations provide the GIO with the appropriate data (e.g. activity data, emission factors, GHG emissions and removals) through compiling various statistics and also provide relevant information on supplementary information required under Article 7.1. They then check and verify the inventories (i.e. CRF, NIR), including the spreadsheets that are actually utilised for the estimation, as a part of the quality control (QC) activities.

The checked and verified inventories determined as Japan’s official values are then published by the MoEJ and submitted to the UNFCCC Secretariat by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Reference: Ministry of the Environment, Japan and Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2014)).

Figure 11.1 shows the overall institutional arrangement for Japan’s inventory preparation.

Thus far, on the basis of Articles 4 and 12 of the UNFCCC, Annex I countries have compiled a GHG inventory annually, but Non-Annex I Parties have only done so once or twice and with the national communications (NCs).

However, at COP16 in 2010 and COP17 in 2011, it was agreed that, in addition to the NCs, all Parties to the Convention, including Non-Annex I Parties, shall submit information on GHG inventories as a biennial update report (BUR). It was also agreed at COP17 that developing country Parties should submit their first BUR by December 2014 and subsequent reports every 2 years. For this reason, more accurate inventories, which support the development of mitigation measures and the verification of the effectiveness of these measures, need to be reported at a higher frequency than ever before. The importance of periodical GHG inventories is increasing on an international basis, which means Non-Annex I Parties unfamiliar with compiling the GHG inventory periodically will require capacity building.

With this aim in mind, GIO convened the Workshop on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventories in Asia (WGIA) in 2003. In order to improve the quality of GHG inventories, it is important for the related countries to exchange information on them, as this will aid inventory compilers and administrators managing the compilation. Since 2003, government officials, inventory compilers and researchers directly involved with inventory preparation in the participating countries have met to exchange information at the workshop (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2012)).

The objectives of the workshop are:

Participating countries are Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam (14 countries).

WGIAs consist of the following sessions:

Basically, each WGIA consists of three of the above four sessions.

Japan is the only Annex I Party in Asia with experience in completing the periodical GHG inventory in Asia. Since Asian cultures and climates vary greatly from those of Europe and the USA, so do the methods of estimating emissions and removals and institutional arrangements. As Japan has constructed an appropriate methodology and institutional arrangement based on Asian culture and climate, it can share its GHG inventory information through WGIA with other countries in Asia, due to their cultural and climatic similarities.

The WGIA and capacity building for measurability, reportability and verifiability were both initiated in 2003 with the aim of building capacity within Asia to develop a GHG inventory. Since its sixth meeting in 2008 (WGIA6), WGIA has been convened as a part of the “Kobe Initiative” of the G8 Environment Ministers’ Meeting (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2009a)).

WGIA has grown since its first meeting in 2003, from 27 participants to over 100 at WGIA7 in 2009 (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2009b)) then to 130 at WGIA10 in 2012. The 2014 WGIA (WGIA12) was attended by 123 persons from 14 WGIA member countries and international organisations and is now one of the biggest climate change events in Asia. It has also received requests from countries such as Pakistan and East Timor, which are not currently members of WGIA, to attend future WGIA meetings. There is the possibility of expanding the scale of the workshop.

The participating countries that acted as host countries for WGIA from 2003 to 2014 are shown in Table 11.3.

The topics of discussion covered various categories on WGIA as shown below.

WGIAs consist of the following sessions:

Basically, as mentioned above, each WGIA consists of three of the above sessions. All participants join the plenary sessions and then choose sectoral working-group sessions as well as hands-on training sessions. Mutual learning sessions are closed sessions and are limited in participant number.

Plenary sessions deal with overall and cross-cutting issues on national GHG inventory preparation, such as data provision, institutional arrangements and introduction to countermeasures for climate change of Japan and host countries, as well as mitigation action such as NAMAs. Through discussions in the plenary sessions, participants in WGIAs share information from various data sources, which is useful for improving their inventory preparation systems.

The topics in plenary sessions were:

In plenary sessions, UNFCCC provides information on the international framework and COP decisions. Participants welcome this presentation as cross-cutting issue such as QA/QC; UA and time-series consistency important for quality improvement of the GHG inventory are discussed.

Regarding the GHG inventory, there are many sectors and categories, such as energy, industrial process, agriculture, LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forestry) and waste. WGIAs provide the sectoral working group sessions in order to discuss particular sector-specific issues and find solutions to them. There are various issues for inventory preparation in each sector, and the sectoral working group sessions deal with sector- or category-specific issues.

Table 11.4 shows main topics containing sectoral working group sessions. The WGIA participants are government officials and inventory compilers or researchers directly involved with inventory preparation. Inventory compilers and researchers attended the breakout sessions for each expert sector or category; and government officials attended the breakout group of cross-cutting issues such as regional and/or city-level GHG inventories. Discussion of such sector-specific issues among sectoral experts is recommended in order to cover the issues thoroughly.

The mutual learning (ML) session is an activity to improve the inventories of individual countries through the following processes: (1) exchanging inventories between two countries, (2) learning from a partner’s inventory and (3) exchanging comments on each other’s inventories. The primary purpose of ML is to improve GHG inventories by providing details of methods and data for GHG emission/removal estimation between two countries and exchanging comments on the methods and data. Studying a partner country’s inventory and discussing it with its compilers provide useful information for inventory preparation and compilation. ML is also expected to foster and strengthen cooperation among GHG inventory experts in Asia. Since the aim of ML is not criticism or auditing, participants can freely communicate on a one-to-one basis as equals, rather than in one-way communication as is found with the examiner–examinee relationship (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2015)).

ML was introduced to other participating countries in WGIA8 in 2010 and participants requesting mutual learning sessions between WGIA countries in the sessions of WGIA. Therefore, ML has been conducted since WGIA9 (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2010)).

The ML sessions are closed sessions in order to ensure confidentiality of discussions in the sessions; only participants, chairpersons, facilitators and rapporteurs for each ML session and the WGIA Secretariat are allowed to enter conference rooms for the sessions in principle (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2015)).

Through the discussions, participants studied their partner country’s methodologies for GHG emission estimations, which usually differ from their own, to receive hints on improving their own inventory. They also shared any technical issues (e.g. data collection, adoption of emission factors, national system) in order to better overcome them.

Several participants in past MLs stated that they had improved their inventory through the ML experience and in particular were able to refine their inventories before official submission to the UNFCCC such as NCs and BURs. The participants in WGIA11 acknowledged the efficacy of ML in improving their inventories and agreed that implementation of MLs should continue in future WGIAs.

In the case of WGIA12, the WGIA Secretariat notified the participants of WGIA of the ML and received applications from 29 teams from eight parties on December 2013. Considering the requirements of the applicants and an appropriate balance among sectors and feasibility of implementation, the WGIA Secretariat (GIO) organised them into pairs (Indonesia and Myanmar on energy sector, China and Mongolia on agriculture sector and Vietnam on LULUCF sector) on April 2014 (Reference: Proceedings of WGIA12 2014).

Thus, the ML sessions were conducted for the energy sector, agriculture sector and LULUCF sector, as shown in Table 11.5. Participating countries studied worksheets for emission estimates and methodology reports to estimate the emissions of partners and exchanged comments and answer sheets before the WGIA discussion. Many findings and hints to improve the GHG inventories were exchanged across the table in the session of WGIA12 in Bangkok (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2015)).

Prior to WGIA12, only ten countries had attended the ML sessions. As mentioned above, ML is useful for improving one’s own inventory and is considered a form of external quality assurance activity by some participants. It is hoped that more participants will join the ML sessions in future WGIA.

Most WGIA participating countries have insufficient experience in GHG inventory preparation, especially in terms of technical issues such as key category analysis and IPCC Inventory Software. Technical issues on how to implement inventory preparation obviously need addressing with training, which is why WGIA is useful as it provides hands-on training sessions. In the sessions participants can attempt to actually implement some of the technical processes of inventory preparation.

Table 11.6 shows the topics of hands-on training sessions.

The Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MoEJ) and the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) convened the WGIA as a capacity building workshop for measurability, reportability and verifiability (MRV) as a part of Japan’s assistance for developing countries. Ever since 2003, the workshops have aimed at supporting Non-Annex I (NAI) Parties in Asia to develop and improve their GHG inventories.

In August 2014, the 12th workshop was held and attended by over 120 experts from 14 WGIA member countries (Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam), as well as representatives from the Secretariat of the UNFCCC, Technical Support Unit from the IPCC Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (IPCC TFI TSU), the Regional Capacity Building Project for Sustainable National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Management Systems in Southeast Asia (SEA GHG Project), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI), the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and relevant Japanese institutes in Bangkok, Thailand.

The GIO (Secretariat of the WGIA12) both organises the programmes of WGIA, according to the needs and requests of the participants, and conducts the WGIA.

In WGIA12, the biennial update report (BUR) to be submitted by Non-Annex I countries by year end and the international consultation and analysis (ICA, part of BUR) were key topics on the discussion agenda. Also discussed were the importance of accurate GHG inventories and QA/QC activities; the importance of MRV at various levels, such as region and city levels, for verification of implementation and planning for NAMA; the necessity of consolidating stable systems of GHG inventory for applying high cost–benefit technology in the AFOLU sector; and the need to maintain ongoing correspondence with inventory compilers and researchers providing new technology.

Through WGIA12, the capacity development of participating countries for MRV and the network for BUR were enhanced, with the aim of creating BUR, conducting ICA and implementing the intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs).

WGIA 13 will be held in Indonesia, where BURs submitted by Non-Annex I Parties this year will be presented by the participants. Further, mutual learning and discussions concerning ICA will be conducted. (Reference: Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office of Japan (GIO), CGER, NIES (2015)).