• Energy Research

Abstract The Kyoto Protocol created a framework of responsibilities and mechanisms to mitigate climate change by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The Protocol stipulates accounting and reporting of GHG emissions and removals, such as energy use, industrial processes, agriculture, waste and net emissions resulting from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities. Emissions reported according to the rules set by the Kyoto Protocol do not include GHG emissions outside a country's boundaries resulting from the production of imported goods or services. As a result, GHG accounts constructed according to the Kyoto Protocol reflect the GHG emissions resulting from the production system of a country, but not all the emissions resulting from the consumption of goods and services within the country. However, as previous studies demonstrate, a country's emission balance changes remarkably if emissions related to goods or services imported and exported are taken into account. Here, we go beyond the aforementioned studies which mainly focus on GHG emissions from fossil fuel combustion. We assess, in a first-order approach, upstream emissions that result from LULUC activities outside a country while the produced goods are consumed within the country. In our study we focus on Austria's livestock system to elucidate the difference between production and consumption-related emissions accounting approaches. We study direct and 'hidden' (embodied) GHG emissions associated with Austria's bilateral trade in livestock and livestock-related products, based on the integration of full carbon accounting (FCA) and life cycle analysis (LCA).

To have a >50% chance of limiting warming below 2 °C, most recent scenarios from integrated assessment models (IAMs) require large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies (NETs). These are technologies that result in the net removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. We quantify potential global impacts of the different NETs on various factors (such as land, greenhouse gas emissions, water, albedo, nutrients and energy) to determine the biophysical limits to, and economic costs of, their widespread application. Resource implications vary between technologies and need to be satisfactorily addressed if NETs are to have a significant role in achieving climate goals.

The assessment of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air pollutants emitted to and removed from the atmosphere ranks high on international political and scientific agendas. Growing international concern and cooperation regarding the climate change problem have increased the need to consider the uncertainty in inventories of GHG emissions. The approaches to address uncertainty discussed in this special issue reflect attempts to improve national inventories, not only for their own sake but also from a wider, system analytic perspective. They seek to strengthen the usefulness of national emission inventories under a compliance and/or global monitoring and reporting framework. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the benefits of including inventory uncertainty in policy analyses. The issues raised by the authors and featured in their papers, along with the role that uncertainty analysis plays in many of their arguments, highlight the challenges and the importance of dealing with uncertainty. While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clearly stresses the value of conducting uncertainty analyses and offers guidance on executing them, the arguments made here in favor of performing these studies go well beyond any suggestions made by the IPCC to date. Improving and conducting uncertainty analyses are needed to develop a clear understanding and informed policy. Uncertainty matters and is key to many issues related to inventorying and reducing emissions. Considering uncertainty helps to avoid situations that can create a false sense of certainty or lead to invalid views of subsystems. Dealing proactively with uncertainty allows for the generation of useful knowledge that the international community should have to hand while strengthening the 2015 Paris Agreement, which had been agreed at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, considering uncertainty does not come free. Proper treatment of uncertainty is demanding because it forces us to take the step from “simple to complex” and to grasp a holistic system view. Only, thereafter, can we consider potential simplifications. That is, comprehensive treatment of uncertainty does not necessarily offer quick or easy solutions for policymakers. This special issue brings together 13 papers that resulted from the 2015 (4th) International Workshop on Uncertainty in Atmospheric Emissions, in Cracow, Poland. While they deal with many different aspects of the uncertainty in emission estimates, they are guided by the same principal question: “What GHGs shall be verified at what spatio-temporal scale to support conducive legislation at local and national scales, while ensuring effective governance at the global scale?” This question is at the heart of mitigation and adaptation. It requires an understanding of the entire system of GHG sources and sinks, their spatial characteristics and the temporal scales at which they react and interact, the uncertainty (accuracy and/or precision) with which fluxes can be measured, and last but not least, the consequences that follow from all of the aforementioned aspects, for policy actors to frame compliance and/or global monitoring and reporting agreements. This bigger system context serves as a reference for the papers in the special issue, irrespective of their spatio-temporal focus, and is used as a guide for the reader.

Natural carbon sinks currently absorb approximately half of the anthropogenic CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning, cement production and land-use change. However, this airborne fraction may change in the future depending on the emissions scenario. An important issue in developing carbon budgets to achieve climate stabilisation targets is the behaviour of natural carbon sinks, particularly under low emissions mitigation scenarios as required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. A key requirement for low carbon pathways is to quantify the effectiveness of negative emissions technologies which will be strongly affected by carbon cycle feedbacks. Here we find that Earth system models suggest significant weakening, even potential reversal, of the ocean and land sinks under future low emission scenarios. For the RCP2.6 concentration pathway, models project land and ocean sinks to weaken to 0.8 ± 0.9 and 1.1 ± 0.3 GtC yr−1 respectively for the second half of the 21st century and to −0.4 ± 0.4 and 0.1 ± 0.2 GtC yr−1 respectively for the second half of the 23rd century. Weakening of natural carbon sinks will hinder the effectiveness of negative emissions technologies and therefore increase their required deployment to achieve a given climate stabilisation target. We introduce a new metric, the perturbation airborne fraction, to measure and assess the effectiveness of negative emissions. Environmental Research Letters, 11 (9) ISSN:1748-9326 ISSN:1748-9318

Industrial processes cause significant emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to the atmosphere and, therefore, have high mitigation and adaptation potential for global change. Spatially explicit (gridded) emission inventories (EIs) should allow us to analyse sectoral emission patterns to estimate the potential impacts of emission policies and support decisions on reducing emissions. However, such EIs are often based on simple downscaling of national level emission estimates and the changes in subnational emission distributions do not necessarily reflect the actual changes driven by the local emission drivers. This article presents a high-definition, 100-m resolution bottom-up inventory of GHG emissions from industrial processes (fuel combustion activities in energy and manufacturing industries, fugitive emissions, mineral products, chemical industries, metal production and food and drink industries), which is exemplified for data for Poland. The study objectives include elaboration of the universal approach for mapping emission sources, algorithms for emission disaggregation, estimation of emissions at the source level and uncertainty analysis. We start with IPCC-compliant national sectoral GHG estimates made using Polish official statistics and, then, propose an improved emission disaggregation algorithm that fully utilises a collection of activity data available at the national/provincial level to the level of individual point and diffused (area) emission sources. To ensure the accuracy of the resulting 100-m resolution emission fields, the geospatial data used for mapping emission sources (point source geolocation and land cover classification) were subject to thorough human visual inspection. The resulting 100-m emission field even holds cadastres of emissions separately for each industrial emission category. We also compiled cadastres in regular grids and, then, compared them with the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR). A quantitative analysis of discrepancies between both results reveals quite frequent misallocations of point sources used in the EDGAR compilation that considerably deteriorate high-resolution inventories. We also use a Monte-Carlo method-based uncertainty assessment that yields a detailed estimation of the GHG emission uncertainty in the main categories of the analysed processes. We found that the above-mentioned geographical coordinates and patterns used for emission disaggregation have the greatest impact on the overall uncertainty of GHG inventories from the industrial processes. We evaluate the mitigation potential of industrial emissions and the impact of separate emission categories. This study proposes a method to accurately quantify industrial emissions at a policy relevant spatial scale in order to contribute to the local climate mitigation via emission quantification (local to national) and scientific assessment of the mitigation effort (national to global). Apart from the above, the results are also of importance for studies that confront bottom-up and top-down approaches and represent much more accurate data for global high-resolution inventories to compare with.