29 April 2009: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report of the individual review of the greenhouse gas inventory submissions of the European Community (EC) (FCCC/ARR/2008/EC) and Switzerland (FCCC/ARR/2008/CHE) submitted in 2007 and 2008.

The expert review team (ERT) finds the EC’s 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 finds the 2008 inventory submission is of high-quality and shows improvements on most of the areas identified in the previous review and that, in general, the 2008 submission of the EC has been improved compared to the 2007 submission as it has taken account of recommendations from the in-country review of the initial report under the Kyoto Protocol, which was organized after the 2007 submission. The further findings are that the inventory is consistent as it is a compilation of GHG inventories of the 15 EC member States that were part of the European Community on 1 January 1995 (EC-15). To improve transparency, the ERT recommends that the EC provide more sectoral information and analysis of all 27 member States of the European Community (EC-27) and that any future changes to the national system, as they relate to the Kyoto Protocol (EC-15), be clearly documented. If possible, the ERT encourages the EC to use only information from the EC-15 in the submission due under the Kyoto Protocol and information from the EC-27 for the submission under the Convention.
The ERT notes that Switzerland uses mainly country-specific or higher-tier methods to estimate emissions and removals, and has used the latest scientific findings. The 2006 inventory, as submitted in the 2008 annual submission, is of high quality and shows a great improvement on the previous year’s submission. The institutional arrangements are well developed and properly documented, especially for the quality assessment/quality control (QA/QC) and archiving system, which was certified to ISO 9001:2000 standard by the Swiss Association for Quality and Management Systems (SQS) on 6 December 2007. However, the ERT recommends that Switzerland further improve its uncertainty estimates for some of its key data sources, especially energy statistics, and that the party improve the explanation of, and justification for, the selection of country-specific methods and emission factors (EFs) in the NIR. [Report of the review of the EC’s submission] [Report of the review of Switzerland’s submission]