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Greenhouse gas emissions, inventories and validation

Fowler, David; Skiba, Ute; Moncrieff, John B.; Polson, Debbie. 2008 Greenhouse gas emissions, inventories and validation. In: Crichton, Karen; Audsley, Rebecca, (eds.) Land Management in a Changing Environment. SAC and SEPA Biennial Conference, SAC, 134-151.

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Abstract/Summary

The emission of greenhouse gases has become a very high priority research and environmental policy issue due to their effects on global climate. The knowledge of changes in global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution is well documented, and the global budgets are reasonably well known. However, even at this scale there are important uncertainties in the budgets, for example, in the case of methane while the main sources and sinks have been identified, temporal changes in the global average concentrations since the early 1990s are not understood. In the absence of a quantitative explanation with appropriate experimental support, it is clear that current knowledge of the causes of changes in the global methane budget is inadequate to predict the effect of changes in specific emission sectors. In developing control strategies to reduce emissions it is necessary to validate national emissions and their spatial disaggregation. The methodology to underpin such a process is at an early stage of development and is not fully implemented in any country, even though target emission reductions have already been announced. Furthermore, the scale of the emission reductions is large (eg of 60% reductions by 2050 relative to 1990 baseline). There is therefore an urgent requirement for measurement based verification processes to support such challenging emission reductions. In this paper we provide the background in greenhouse gas emissions globally and in the UK followed by examples of approaches to validate emissions at the UK scale and within the regions.

Item Type: Publication - Book Section
Programmes: CEH Programmes pre-2009 publications > Biogeochemistry
UKCEH and CEH Sections/Science Areas: Billett (to November 2013)
ISBN: 1854828673
NORA Subject Terms: Ecology and Environment
Atmospheric Sciences
Related URLs:
Date made live: 26 Aug 2008 10:03 +0 (UTC)
URI: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/3856

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