7 August 2012: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report of the centralized review of the 2011 annual submission of Norway (FCCC/ARR/2011/NOR), which states that total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increased by 3.1% between 1990 and 2009.

The Expert Review Team (ERT) that conducted the centralized review concludes that Norway’s inventory submission was prepared in compliance with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines and relevant Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines. It also finds that the inventory submission, the common reporting format (CRF) tables and the national inventory report (NIR) are generally complete, with the exception of soda ash use in industrial processes.

The ERT identifies the following cross-cutting issues for improvement: strengthening of quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) procedures for specific sectors, in particular for the energy sector; strengthening of procedures to monitor measures such as updates of uncertainty estimates and verification measures planned to be implemented periodically; and provision of more precise descriptions and justifications for country-specific methodologies and recalculations to increase the transparency for the changes implemented and their impact on the time-series consistency.

The ERT further formulates recommendations for improving information presented, including: providing more detailed information on procedures for categories in the energy sector; providing additional information on the QA/QC procedures and time-series consistency for the use of plant-specific data introduced to the EU emissions trading scheme (EU ETS); improving the transparency of reporting in the energy, industrial processes, agriculture and gas sectors; and improving, in the land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector, the transparency of reporting of carbon stock changes in mineral and organic soils. [Publication: Report of the Individual Review of the Annual Submission of Norway Submitted in 2011]