17 March 2010: The UNFCCC Secretariat has published reports submitted in 2009 of the individual reviews of the annual submissions of Austria (FCCC/ARR/2009/AUT), Belarus (FCCC/ARR/2009/BLR) and Monaco (FCCC/ARR/2009/MCO).

The Expert Review Team (ERT) concludes that Austria’s inventory is 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). In addition, the 2009 annual inventory submission is of a high quality, complete and reported in line with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines for national communications. In the course of the review, the ERT identified a limited number of areas where further improvements to the inventory are needed. The ERT also encourages Austria to explore the possibility of structuring its reporting, in its next annual inventory submission, following the annotated outline of the national inventory report (NIR), and the guidance contained therein.
Regarding Belarus, the ERT finds that the inventory is generally in line with the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines, the IPCC good practice guidance and the IPCC good practice guidance for LULUCF. The ERT notes progress made since the last submissions, but identifies an urgent need for improvement of transparency, consistency, completeness of the inventory reporting and implementation of quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC). The ERT notes the long list of subcategories reported as not estimated (NE), some of which could be classified as key categories. In addition, particularly in the energy sector, subcategories were aggregated in such a way that the ERT could not assess whether all necessary categories had been included. It is further underlined that this lack of transparency could lead to underestimations or overestimations of emissions from the energy sector or to double counting between the energy and industrial processes sectors. The ERT finds Belarus’ inventory of the LULUCF sector to be incomplete as many of the mandatory categories are not reported. The system of land-use representation is not yet sufficiently elaborated to provide adequate, consistent, complete and transparent information on the IPCC land-use categories, including land-use conversion. The ERT notes a potential overestimation of net removals within the sector. The NIR and common reporting format (CRF) tables lack transparency and the ERT notes several cases of inconsistency between the NIR and the CRF tables. The ERT encourages Belarus to explore the possibility of structuring its reporting in its next annual submission in accordance with the annotated outline of the NIR, and the guidance contained therein.
Regarding Monaco, the ERT finds its inventory to be generally in line with the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines, the IPCC good practice guidance and the IPCC good practice guidance for LULUCF. However, the ERT notes that Monaco uses IPCC tier 1 default methodology to estimate emissions for almost all categories (except road transportation and waste incineration), including for key categories. The ERT notes that the NIR, although very concise, does cover most of the information required in accordance with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines. The ERT further indicates that that the transparency of the NIR could be improved by providing a more detailed discussion of the justifications to choose activity data (AD), methodologies and emission factors (EFs). The ERT also notes the absence of a table of contents in the NIR, which diminishes the usability of the document. [Austria Inventory] [Belarus Inventory] [Monaco Inventory]