January 2009: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released reports of the individual review of the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories of Australia, submitted in 2008, and of Italy and Romania, submitted in 2007 and 2008. The expert review team (ERT) finds that all the inventories have been prepared 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).

Regarding Australia, the ERT concludes that its inventory and reporting has been conducted in accordance with the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, but that the completeness of the inventory could be improved and contains potential underestimations. The ERT identifies that the transparency of the inventory is inhibited by the fact that emissions for numerous categories in the industrial processes and the solvent and other product use sectors are reported as confidential, and are subsequently clustered under the “other” category. The ERT recommends, inter alia, that Australia further improve the completeness of the inventory by reporting emissions by sources and removals by sinks for activities that do occur in the party; and further improve the transparency of the inventory by providing detailed information in the national inventory report on methods and data, particularly for those methods that differ from those provided or recommended in the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines, the IPCC good practice guidance and/or the IPCC good practice guidance for LULUCF, or higher tier methods (e.g. national carbon accounting system and FullCAM models); and address issues regarding the representation of land areas in the LULUCF sector.
The ERT finds Italy’s 2008 annual inventory submission to be of a high quality with many issues raised during the review of the 2006 submission having been addressed. The ERT makes several recommendations to further improve the quality of the inventory, including improving transparency by providing explanations of trends of emissions from certain categories and/or certain implied emission factors (for example in energy and industrial processes) and by providing additional information on country-specific methods, emission factors, and parameters used to calculate emissions (for example in energy, agriculture, and waste). The ETR also recommends updating fuel split between national and international transportation.
Concerning Romania, the ERT identifies a number of potential minor under- and overestimates of emissions, but finds the inventory to be generally complete covering all sectors and most categories, all years of the inventory time series, and geographical areas. The ERT finds that the transparency of the annual submission has improved since the previous submission, but further improvements are still necessary. The ERT notes that Romania has not implemented all recommendations from the previous review, particularly in regard to the development of higher tier methods to estimate emissions from key categories, and recommends that Romania implement all recommendations from this and previous reviews in its next annual submission. [Australia’s report] [Italy’s report] [Romania’s report]