New Guidance Document for Peer Review of GHG Inventories for Non- Annex Parties

A new document for the peer review of GHG inventories for Parties has been created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat, with the support of the Global Support Programme (GSP) for National Communications and Biennial Update Reports.

The purpose of this guidance is  to serve as a manual for experts to assess the GHG inventory and inventory development process. It describes how to perform a review of national GHG inventory management systems and national GHG inventories for non-Annex I Parties, taking into consideration and ensuring consistency with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines for national GHG inventories, and the Consultative Group of Experts on National Communications from Parties not included in Annex I to the Convention (CGE) and United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) training materials, workbooks, templates on developing sustainable national GHG inventory systems.

The guidance document can also be used as a QA/QC tool for experts or the inventory compilation team members to review its own GHG inventory and assess its quality in regards to the IPCC principles. This internal review can produce the foundation for the party to develop its improvement plan for future inventory preparation cycles.

The objectives of the guide are to:

• Provide clear guidance for the peer-review of national GHG inventory reports and national GHG inventory man­agement systems, to achieve higher quality reporting, through the use of Quality Assurance and Quality Control procedures in a non-intrusive or punitive manner;
• Achieve enhanced capacity of national experts involved in the process of the preparation of national GHG in­ventories to develop high quality, transparent, national GHG inventory reports and maintain sustainable national GHG inventory management systems;
• Facilitate the enhanced process of Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) of national GHG inventory reports, both across countries (peer-review) and within countries (expert-review).