Chapter 4 Climate Impacts and Responses

Responses to Climate Change > Estimates of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

As part of commitments under the UNFCCC, Australia has produced an inventory of national greenhouse gas emissions every year since 1990. These inventories provide a baseline for monitoring and reviewing response actions and for developing projections of greenhouse gas emissions.

Periodic State and Territory inventories, in addition to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI), are also produced. Each inventory is essentially a database of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions sources and sinks, categorised into six sectors: energy, land use change and forestry, agriculture, industrial processes, solvent and other product use, and waste.

The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 2000 (AGO, 2002) provides the latest report on Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. This inventory incorporates improvements in data collection methods that have been used to update emission estimates for the previous years. The NGGI aims to provide robust estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and sinks that are neither overestimates or underestimates of the true emissions. A continuous improvement program ensures that methodologies and data sources are periodically reviewed, that uncertainty is progressively reduced to acceptable levels and that the report is subject to rigorous quality control and quality assurance procedures.

The Australian Government has established the National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) to improve inventory control in the land sector. The NCAS tracks production and removal of greenhouse gases arising from human-induced changes to the forests, plant cover and agricultural and grazing lands across Australian land systems.

The NCAS is a single highly integrated digital map-based information system. It couples remotely sensed land cover change, land management, climate and soils data, with greenhouse accounting and ecosystem modelling to provide a dynamic 30-year perspective on the nature and extent of human-induced change in Australian land systems over the period since 1970. The NCAS is progressively providing state-of-the-art methodological capability for international reporting of greenhouse sources and sinks, including accounting for all relevant pools of carbon (above and below ground), all greenhouse gases and relevant activities since 1972 associated with Land Use Change, Land Use Change and Forestry (as required under the Kyoto Protocol).

The credible and verifiable data and methods developed under NCAS now fully replace those used previously in the preparation of Australia’s Land Use Change emissions estimates. With continued refinement, NCAS methodologies will also be used for calculating emissions from other land sectors, including commercial forestry (plantations and native forest management) and non-CO2 sources.

The AGO, the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and a range of research organisations across Australia are working towards more accurate estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and methods to quantify emission reduction opportunities for agricultural land uses.

Scientists at CSIRO Atmospheric Research are investigating new ways to measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, particularly over the Australian continent and Southern Ocean. They have developed an instrument that is both less expensive and much more precise to operate than previous methods of measuring CO2. The LOFLOTM CO2 analyser can potentially operate unattended for five months and is 90% less costly to run than conventional measurement systems. This makes them ideal to fill gaps in the current observation network over land, or to detect subtle changes in CO2 sources and sinks from remote locations around the Southern Ocean. The devices are around 10-times more precise in detecting the minute differences in atmospheric CO2 concentrations needed to identify greenhouse gas sources and sinks. The research will lead to ways to monitor the effectiveness of international actions to limit future CO2 emissions.