LULUCF GHG Inventory Support for Romania

Aether is supporting the Romanian National Research and Development Institute for Cryogenic and Isotopic Technologies (ICSI) in the compilation of the Romanian national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory for non-forest land areas. We are helping to ensure that Romania’s land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) inventory is robust and of high quality.

The Challenge

Romania is required to report GHG emissions data to the European Union and under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The new team at ICSI have been responsible for compiling emission and removal GHG estimates from non-forest land areas since September 2019. These non-forest land areas are classified under cropland, grassland, wetlands, settlements, and other land. The key challenges for the ICSI team were:

• Compiling a consistent land use timeseries. As is the case for many countries, Romania uses multiple datasets to determine land uses and land use changes over the timeseries from 1970. This often leads to challenges for compiling a consistent annual timeseries.
• The lack of a transparent and well documented methodology for calculating emissions and removals from all carbon pools (living biomass, dead organic matter and soil organic matter). This has hindered ICSI from ensuring accuracy and implementing improvements in their GHG estimates.
• Reporting emissions and removals from cropland management and grazing land management under the Kyoto Protocol.

ICSI engaged Aether to assist with improving the estimates and reporting of emissions and removals associated with non-forest land uses and to increase the capacity of the national team.

The Solution

Aether has been supporting ICSI since 2020. The first task was to create a new tool for calculating emissions and removals from the non-forest land LULUCF sectors that was transparent and user-friendly. The next stage of the work focused on making improvements to the compilation file in terms of accuracy, transparency and completeness through better documentation, additional QA/QC and structuring. Aether staff used their experience with the UNFCCC reviews to conduct a full methodology review to ensure that the estimates are in line with current reporting requirements and best practice from the 2006 IPCC Guidelines. As part of this work, Aether also supports ICSI to analyse the uncertainty of GHG estimates from the non-forest land.

A key aspect to delivering this work was to build the capacity of the new national team through providing hands-on training and a technical review of the outputs they prepared for reporting.

The Result

ICSI has a new compilation tool for estimating GHG emissions and removals from non-forest land areas which:

• Automatically calculates emissions and removals based on input data which can easily be updated.
• Implements a methodology which is in line with the 2006 IPCC Guidelines and the 2019 IPCC Refinement.
• Sets out the calculations in a transparent, user-friendly way to enable the national team to enhance their capacity and continue to improve the estimates.
• Integrates the calculation of uncertainties of the emissions estimates.

To find out more the different services that we offer to national inventory teams click here.

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