6 July 2012: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report of the centralized review of the 2011 annual submission of France (FCCC/ARR/2011/FRA) that states that total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions decreased by 8.1% between 1990 and 2009.

The Expert Review Team (ERT) that conducted the centralized review concludes that France’s inventory submission was prepared in compliance with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, except for the reporting of some carbon pools. It also concludes that France’s inventory is in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines, except for: the allocation of fuel combustion and fugitive emissions from petroleum refining and of fugitive emissions from biogas; and the estimation of emissions from manure management. The ERT recommends that France continue to improve the transparency of the national inventory report (NIR) according to recommendations from the previous review, and report on all recalculations in its next annual submission.

The ERT identifies various cross-cutting issues for improvement, including: the uncertainty analysis; the transparency and completeness of the information on the key categories analysis and recalculations; the transparency of the structure of the NIR, and the transparency and consistency between the NIR and the common reporting format (CRF) tables for the geographical scope of the information reported; and the transparency of the methodologies used in the industrial processes sector and in the agricultural sector. [Publication: Report of the Individual Review of the Annual Submission of France Submitted in 2011]