International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—This paper aims to evaluate potential factors that enable developing countries to update national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories on a regular basis, by analyzing to what extent each factor differentiates frequency of submissions by countries of national communications and/or biennial update reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To this end, the following steps were taken: (1) identification of arrangements and processes for the preparation of national GHG inventories to be used as evaluation criteria; (2) grouping of developing countries by frequency of submissions, and selection of their national reports for evaluation; (3) scoring of the selected national reports against the evaluation criteria; (4) analysis of the assigned scores. The finding indicates that funding support under the UNFCCC has not been translated to building a capacity to produce regular inventories, suggesting that a potential value exists for another type of support that specifically meets the needs of developing countries to achieve a sustainable inventory system. As GHG inventories are the foundation for tracking progress towards mitigation goals, if the enhanced transparency framework outlined in the Paris Agreement is to be successfully implemented, capacity building on GHG inventory in developing countries should be given priority.

Index Terms—Capacity building, greenhouse gas inventory, reporting, transparency.

M. Kawanishi is with Japan International Cooperation Agency, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: Kawanishi.Masato@jica.go.jp).
R. Fujikura is with the Faculty of Sustainability Studies, Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: fujikura@hosei.ac.jp).

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Cite: Masato Kawanishi and Ryo Fujikura, "Evaluation of Enabling Factors for Sustainable National Greenhouse Gas Inventory in Developing Countries," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 290-297, 2018.