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National System Templates: Building sustainable national inventory management systems

11am, July 28th, 2015

National System Templates provide developing countries with a starting point to develop national GHG inventory management systems.

Developing greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories is an essential first step toward managing emissions. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assists developing countries to improve their capacity to estimate and track their GHG emissions. A complete and transparent national GHG inventory is an essential tool for understanding emissions and trends, projecting future emissions and identifying sectors for cost-effective emission reduction opportunities.

A major component of EPA’s approach is to build sustainable national GHG inventory management systems using the pre-defined National System Templates as a starting point. Completed templates can be compiled into a single National inventory system report, which provides a comprehensive documentation of each critical component for managing development of the GHG inventory development process.

The advantages of the National System Templates are that they:

  • Focus on documenting essential information in a concise format and avoid wasting time in writing unnecessarily long reports;
  • Standardize tasks, allowing countries within regions to share information and compare and contrast results;
  • Ensure roles and responsibilities are understood;
  • Accommodate varying levels of national capacity;
  • Provide an objective and efficient system for identifying priorities for future improvements;
  • Serve as an instruction manual and a starting point for future inventory teams in developing an inventory;
  • Help countries apply IPCC Good Practice Guidelines and other UN guidance documents for preparing national inventories;
  • Create transparency in a country’s national system; and
  • Facilitate inventory improvement over time.

Six individual templates are available:

  • Institutional arrangements for national inventory systems
  • Methods and data documentation
  • Description of quality assurance and quality control procedures
  • Description of archiving system
  • Key category analysis
  • National inventory improvement plan

Access the National System Templates.

For more information see the EPA National GHG inventory capacity building website.

Institutions Involved

  • US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
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