National GHG inventory capacity in developing countries – a global assessment of progress

ABSTRACT

Although developing countries have compiled greenhouse gas inventories (GHGI) for over 20 years, improving national GHGI capacity remains a priority under the Paris Agreement. However, a global assessment of GHGI capacity status and change over time has not yet been conducted. By developing a quantifiable GHGI capacity and quality indices based on a synthesis review of 369 submitted GHGIs, our assessment shows that while roughly half of 133 developing countries have improved their GHGI capacity and quality from 1997 to 2019, the remaining countries have not. This is especially evident regarding the GHGI quality principles of promptness, accuracy, and consistency. Future capacity-building approaches should make it clear how GHGIs can support countries pursuing their domestic climate goals, including climate resiliency and low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions development pathways, while exploring the use of other information sources to replace GHGIs where they are missing. Global assessments of capacity building can largely be improved with increased data availability, which can be addressed collectively under the Paris Agreement.

Key policy insights:

• Globally, from 1997 to 2019, half of developing countries have advanced GHGI capacity, while the other half have not improved their GHGI capacity.

• The quality of GHGIs of countries with higher capacity is better in terms of promptness, accuracy, and consistency.

• Future capacity-building approaches should make it clear how GHGIs can support countries pursuing their domestic climate goals, including climate resiliency and low GHG emissions development pathways.

• Global assessments of capacity building can largely be improved with improved data availability.

KEYWORDS:

• Greenhouse gas inventories
• developing countries
• transparency
• capacity building
• global stocktake
• Paris Agreement

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Junko Akagi, Patrick Cage, Juan Luis Martin Ortega, Sevdalina Tordorova, and Tani Colbert-Sangree for their attentive research assistance. The authors thank Michael Gillenwater, Kiyoto Tanabe, Akihiro Tamai, Klaus Wenzel, Kirstin Huecking, Sumit Prasad, and Anonymous for their expert review and input to the research method and validation of research results. We would also like to thank Damiano Borgogno and Valeria Arroyave for recognizing the importance and relevance of this research. Lastly, we are grateful to the peer-review at Climate Policy for their substantial review towards improving this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the purposes of this research, the reader should not assume that countries that did not submit a GHG2 or GHG3 report have a certain level of capacity. A country may have low, medium, or high capacity during these points in time, however, they are choosing not to submit for reasons external to the capacity dimensions and criteria examined within this study (e.g. political economy dimension, including: national ambition, stakeholder interests, policy effectiveness, and public opinion). For further reference on the political economy dimension, see Zhu et al. (2021).

2 The UNFCCC Roster of Experts contains information on those who are nominated by their respective Governments through the National Focal Points of the Parties under the UNFCCC, to contribute to a number of processes mandated by the COP, CMP, CMA and the subsidiary bodies. These processes, among others, include the reviews of annual submissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories.

3 Four countries (Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, and the Republic of Korea) had considerably high values. As mentioned, this is the only dataset where older data are extrapolated from the most recent data. Therefore, when normalizing, we assigned the capacity of these countries as 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was part of the project, Provision of Consultancy Services on GHG Inventory Capacity, funded by the Global Support Programme (GSP) for National Communications (NCs) and Biennial Update Reports (BURs) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) [UNDP-IRH-201902-RFP-08].