28 April 2009
UNFCCC Secretariat Releases Spain’s GHG Inventory
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24 April 2009: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report of the individual review of the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory submissions of Spain submitted in 2007 and 2008 (FCCC/ARR/2008/ESP).

The expert review team (ERT) finds the inventory to be generally in line with the Revised 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines, the IPCC […]

© UNFCCC24 April 2009: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report of the individual review of the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory submissions of Spain submitted in 2007 and 2008 (FCCC/ARR/2008/ESP). The expert review team (ERT) finds the inventory to be generally in line with the Revised 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines, the IPCC good practice guidance and the IPCC good practice guidance for land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF).

The ERT notes the complexity of Spain’s inventory compilation process and the fact that the party has instituted a national working group on harmonization of inventory data in order to address the challenges of institutional cooperation and administrative arrangements, particularly with regard to the energy sector. The ERT encourages Spain to continue making improvements to its inventory by progressively developing and implementing its national quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) plan.
The ERT notes that Spain has not used data from the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) as a potential QA/QC procedure for verifying the plant-specific information obtained from statistical questionnaires, which is currently used for the preparation of the national inventory. The ERT encourages Spain to use data from the EU ETS as a QA/QC procedure for applicable categories as part of its improvement plans to reduce uncertainty. The ERT commends Spain on its mandatory regulations on the reporting of inventory data, which have had an effect on the availability and supply of data for the preparation of the inventory and on the transparency of the reporting in the national inventory report.
The ERT finds that Spain has made major improvements to the completeness of its inventory by reporting on some categories in the LULUCF sector for the first time, namely non-CO2 emissions from biomass burning (forest land) and CO2 removals from land converted to grassland. The ERT recommends that Spain identify the categories reported in common reporting format CRF table 9(a) that can be estimated using the tier 1 methods and default emission factors provided in the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines and the IPCC good practice guidance, in order to improve the completeness of its inventory in its next annual inventory submission and avoid identification of potential problems regarding these categories in the future.
In response to recommendations made in the previous review report, Spain has made a number of improvements to its inventory regarding transparency, the reallocation of emissions in accordance with the IPCC good practice guidance, disaggregation, accuracy, completeness and time-series consistency. [The document]

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