Friday, August 03, 2007



Climate change: the latest inventory

The Ministry for the Environment quietly released its latest inventory report last week. Some details had been released a few months ago when it was sent to the UNFCCC secretariat, but I've been waiting on the full data before commenting. The headline data is shown in the graph below (stolen from p. 17):

Overall emissions rose by 3.4%, from 74.6 to 77.16 MTCO2-e. The chief culprit here was the energy sector, and the chief culprit within it was electricity generation, where emissions rose by 2.1 MTCO2-e thanks to this. However, there's some slight good news as well - transport emissions, which are regarded as difficult to reduce, dropped slightly. It's small, but the evidence (backed up by MED's latest Energy Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1990-2006 report) suggests that they are at least flatlining, which if it keeps up is good in the long-term.