19 January 2010: The UNFCCC Secretariat has published the in-country review (FCCC/ARR/2009/POL) of the 2009 annual submissions of Poland and the centralized review (FCCC/ARR/2009/BEL) of the 2009 annual submission of Belgium.
The Expert Review Team (ERT) finds that Poland’s inventory submission has been prepared and reported generally in accordance with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, but that improvements are still needed with regard to transparency, time-series consistency and completeness. The inventory submission is complete in terms of common reporting format (CRF) tables for the years 1988–2007 and a national inventory report (NIR), which includes geographical coverage, years and sectors, as well as generally complete in terms of categories and gases. The ERT recommends that the party provide estimates for those categories, particularly in the industrial processes sector and the land use, land use-change and forestry (LULUCF) sector, which were not estimated, in its next annual submission in order to improve completeness. The ERT also notes that the NIR lacks sufficient detail to report transparently on the inventory and that some sectors lack time-series consistency, particularly for the years prior to 1990.
The ERT finds that Belgium’s inventory has been prepared generally in line with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines. The inventory is not complete with respect to the coverage of categories in the energy and LULUCF sectors, and the transparency of the inventory could be improved in regard to documentation of category descriptions, recalculations and methodologies used.
The 2009 annual inventory submission is generally of a good quality and shows improvement over the previous annual submission as a result of Belgium’s efforts to harmonize its inventory across its regions and to address recommendations made during the previous review. The ERT identified a need for further improvement in some areas including: coverage of categories, carbon pools and greenhouse gases in the LULUCF sector; and further improved transparency of the NIR by provision of more category-specific information, such as discussions of emission trends or a comparison of approaches used in the different regions of the country to estimate emissions. [In-country Review of Poland] [In-country Review of Belgium]