Aether have had a major role in the winning consortium for a large EU contract to review Member States Greenhouse Gas emissions inventories in 2012. This review will help to determine the baselines for agreeing targets under the Effort Sharing Decision. Justin Goodwin has brought together a strong team of over 20 trained experts and will have a prominent role in co-ordinating the work for this review in June 2012.
Aether staff recently returned from the UNECE Task Force on Emission Inventories and Projections (TFEIP) annual meeting, which this year was held in Stockholm. The meeting was attended by over 100 emission inventory experts from Europe and EECCA countries. Chris chaired the meeting, Melanie chaired the projections expert panel meeting and Justin gave two presentations: A review of Informative Inventory Reports (IIRs) submitted in 2011 and investigating the links between GMES and emission inventories. GMES stands for Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security and it is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Space Agency, which aims at achieving an autonomous earth observation capacity. In addition, Emma Salisbury gave a presentation in the Combustion and Industry expert panel session on the work that Aether are doing for the European Commission on estimating emissions of ultrafine particles.
As part of their efforts to bring environmental systems up to the standard of EU countries, Turkey are developing their emissions inventory, and Aether are making a leading technical contribution. Chris Dore will be stationed in Turkey on and off across the next 20 months, working to ensure that emission inventories for NOx, SO2, NMVOC and NH3 are developed to a high standard.
Towards the end of 2010, Aether won a contract to help the Irish Environmental Protection Agency compile their greenhouse gas and air quality emissions inventories. Chris Dore has been working with the EPA inventory team in Ireland regularly for the last four months focusing on inventory compilation and development. The work has now moved into the reporting phase, and will ensure that Ireland meet their international reporting commitments under the Gothenburg Protocol, the National Emissions Ceilings Directive, and the Kyoto protocol. Chris commented that “the economic downturn in Ireland has had a marked impact on air emissions. It will be interesting to see to what extent this is also true for other European countries.”