New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2008

• Acknowledgements
• Executive Summary
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Trends in greenhouse gas emissions
• Chapter 3: Energy
• Chapter 4: Industrial processes
• Chapter 5: Solvent and other product use
• Chapter 6: Agriculture
• Chapter 7: Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF)
• Chapter 8: Waste
• Chapter 9: Other
• Chapter 10: Recalculations and improvements
• Chapter 11: KP-LULUCF
• Chapter 12: Information on accounting Kyoto Protocol units
• Chapter 13: Information on changes to the national system
• Chapter 14: Information on changes to the national registry
• Chapter 15: Information on minimisation of adverse impacts
• References
• Annexes to New Zealand’s National Inventory Report for 2008
  • Annex 1: Key categories
  • Annex 2: Methodology and data collection for estimating emissions from fossil fuel combustion
  • Annex 3: Detailed methodological information for other sectors
  • Annex 4: Carbon dioxide reference approach and comparison with sectoral approach, and relevant information on the national energy balance
  • Annex 5: Assessment of completeness and (potential) sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions and removals excluded
  • Annex 6: Additional information and supplementary information under Article 7.1
  • Annex 7: Uncertainty analysis (Table 6.1 of the IPCC Good Practice Guidance)

Annex 7: Uncertainty analysis (Table 6.1 of the IPCC Good Practice Guidance)

Uncertainty estimates are an essential element of a complete emissions inventory. The purpose of uncertainty information is not to dispute the validity of the inventory estimates, but to help prioritise efforts to improve the accuracy of inventories in the future and guide decisions on methodological choice (IPCC, 2000). The good practice guidance also notes that inventories prepared following the revised 1996 IPCC guidelines (IPCC, 1996) and good practice guidance (IPCC, 2000 and 2003) will typically contain a wide range of emission estimates, varying from carefully measured and demonstrably complete data on emissions to order-of-magnitude estimates of highly variable N₂O fluxes from soils and waterways (IPCC, 2000).

New Zealand has included a Tier 1 uncertainty analysis as required by the Climate Change Convention inventory guidelines (UNFCCC, 2006) and IPCC good practice guidance (IPCC, 2000 and 2003). Uncertainties in the categories are combined to provide uncertainty estimates for the entire inventory in any year and the uncertainty in the overall inventory trend over time. LULUCF categories have been included using the absolute value of any removals of CO₂ (Table A7.1). Table A7.2 calculates the uncertainty only in emissions, that is, excluding LULUCF removals.

A7.1 Tier 1 uncertainty calculation

The uncertainty in activity data and emission/removal factors shown in Table A7.1 and A7.2 are equal to half the 95 per cent confidence interval divided by the mean and expressed as a percentage. The reason for halving the 95 per cent confidence interval is that the value corresponds to the familiar plus or minus value when uncertainties are loosely quoted as “plus or minus x per cent”.

Where uncertainty is highly asymmetrical, the larger percentage difference between the mean and the confidence limit is entered. Where only the total uncertainty is known for a category, then:

• if uncertainty is correlated across years, the uncertainty is entered as the emission or the removal factor uncertainty and as zero in the activity data uncertainty
• if uncertainty is not correlated across years, the uncertainty is entered as the uncertainty in the activity data and as zero in the emission or the removal factor uncertainty.

In the Tier 1 method, uncertainties in the trend are estimated using two sensitivities.

• Type A sensitivity is the change in the difference of total emissions between the base year and the current year, expressed as a percentage. Further, this change results from a 1 per cent increase in emissions of a given source category and a greenhouse gas in both the base year and the current year.
• Type B sensitivity is the change in the difference of total emissions between the base year and the current year, expressed as a percentage. Further, this change results from a 1 per cent increase in emissions of a given source category and gas in the current year only.

Uncertainties that are fully correlated between years are associated with Type A sensitivities, and uncertainties that are not correlated between years are associated with Type B sensitivities.

In Tables A7.1 and A7.2, the figure labelled ‘Uncertainty in the trend’ is an estimate of the total uncertainty in the trend in emissions since the base year. This is expressed as the number of percentage points in the 95 per cent confidence interval in the per cent change in emissions since the base year, that is, “since 1990, gross emissions have gone up by 23 per cent ±5.5 per cent”. The total uncertainty in the trend is calculated by combining the contribution of emissions factor uncertainty and activity data uncertainty to the trend across all categories using equation 3.1 (IPCC, 2000).

The values for individual categories are an estimate of the uncertainty introduced into the trend by the category in question.

Table A7.1 The uncertainty calculation (including LULUCF) for New Zealand’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2008 (IPCC Tier 1)

 

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