Title
GHG emission estimates for road transport in national GHG inventories
Author
Pulles, M.P.J.
Yang, H.
Publication year
2011
Abstract
The annual reporting procedures of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have now produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories from 40 so-called Annex I countries for 18 years. This article analyses a subset of these data: emissions from road transport. The article compares the reported data with the technical guidance on GHG emission inventories provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The analysis suggests that some countries use the IPCC's default emission factors, whereas other countries use country-specific values. In the case of diesel-fuelled road transport, the estimated emissions appear to be generally comparable between all countries for all years. For CO2 emissions from gasoline-fuelled road transport, the picture is less clear. The results suggest that the default emission factor for CO2 from motor gasoline as provided by the IPCC is about 3-5% too low. Countries that seem to apply this default value might therefore underestimate their emissions by the same percentage. The effect of this possible underestimate on trends is, however, very small. Despite the possible problem with the default emission factor, the quantification of the trend in emissions is only slightly influenced by this. © 2011 Earthscan.
Subject
Earth & Environment
CAS - Climate, Air and Sustainability
EELS - Earth, Environmental and Life Sciences
Environment
GHG emissions
GHG reporting
Inventories
Road transport fuels
carbon emission
emission inventory
greenhouse gas
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
road transport
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
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TNO identifier
429711
ISSN
1469-3062
Source
Climate Policy, 11 (2), 944-957
Document type
article