IPCC Guidelines
Guidance for national greenhouse gas inventories, used for international reporting.
What are IPCC Guidelines?
The IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories are a set of methodologies and reporting standards developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These guidelines provide countries with a scientific and technical basis for estimating and reporting their anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals.
Why are IPCC Guidelines important?
The IPCC Guidelines are crucial because they ensure consistency, transparency, comparability, completeness, and accuracy (TCCCA) in national GHG inventories. This allows countries to report their emissions and removals to the UNFCCC (e.g., under the Paris Agreement) in a standardized way, forming the basis for international climate policy and progress tracking.
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Frequently asked questions
National governments and their designated agencies (e.g., environmental ministries, national statistics offices) use the IPCC Guidelines to prepare their official national GHG inventories for submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The guidelines provide a mix of prescriptive methodologies (Tier 1, 2, 3 approaches) and flexibility for countries to use country-specific data and methods, depending on data availability and capacity, while maintaining overall methodological rigor.
The IPCC periodically updates its guidelines, with the latest comprehensive revision being the 2006 IPCC Guidelines, supplemented by the 2013 Wetlands Supplement and the 2019 Refinement.