Nations Are Undercounting Emissions, Putting UN Goals at Risk

Meanwhile, a Yale Environment 360 review of U.N. data has found that Qatar, the natural gas-rich Gulf state with the world’s highest per-capita CO2 emissions, has all but given up publicly reporting its emissions. Its last formal submission to the UNFCCC only covered emissions up to 2007. Since then, the country’s undeclared emissions have almost doubled.

The proof of these greenhouse-gas bookkeeping failings lies in the real atmosphere. By one recent count, national emissions inventories total just 70 percent of the actual additions to the air, as calculated using remote sensing and model analysis. The remaining 30 percent are unaccounted for.

As a result, say analysts, the world is flying blind, unable either to verify national compliance with emissions targets or figure out how much atmospheric “room” countries have left for emissions before exceeding agreed warming thresholds.

The UNFCCC requires countries to report regularly and in detail on their greenhouse gas emissions. “Moving confidently towards net-zero emissions requires high-quality emissions statistics for tracking countries’ progress,” says Jan Minx, a climate-change policy analyst at Berlin’s Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. But for many countries, including some of the largest emitters, analysts say, no such reliable statistics exist.

One reason is that the reporting rules for national inventories are a political compromise. They are precise and detailed for rich developed nations, known in U.N. climate jargon as Annex 1 nations. Even if there are gaps, “these are the gold standard, well-resourced and peer-reviewed,” says Peters.

But the rules are much less rigorous for developing countries, known as non-Annex 1 nations, which prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement did not have emissions targets. Data submissions from them can be arbitrary, sometimes outright implausible, and are rarely independently checked, analysts note.

This even though many “developing” nations, including China, have emissions greater than their “developed” counterparts. As a result, two of today’s three biggest emitters — China and India — as well as oil-rich Gulf states with per-capita emissions higher than any Annex 1 nation, need only comply with the less strict reporting standards.

“I would not trust a non-Annex 1 emissions estimate without cross-checking across multiple sources,” says Peters.

“The existing patchwork of greenhouse-gas inventories is woefully inadequate,” concluded Amy Luers, director of sustainability science at Microsoft, in a 2022 review with academic colleagues for Nature. They are “rife with measurement errors, inconsistent classification and gaps in accountability.” The situation is made worse, says coauthor Leehi Yona, an environmental lawyer at Stanford University, by “inflexible and outdated” U.N. guidelines for national reporting.

The reasons for the data gaps vary. Some emissions are eminently measurable but are expressly excluded from the U.N. reporting system because there is no agreement on how to apportion them to national inventories. These include international aircraft and shipping, which make up around 5 percent of global emissions.

Another category is military activity. It is “one of the most urgent,” says Matthias Jonas, an environmental scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He has found that military fuel use, ammunition firing, and fires set off by bombing during the first 18 months of the conflict in Ukraine caused more emissions than Portugal. Another study estimated that the U.S. military also emits more CO2 than Portugal’s national total.

The British advocacy group Common Wealth last year calculated that globally armed forces may be responsible for more than 5 percent of global CO2 emissions. But “we do not have guidelines for estimating these emissions and attributing responsibility,” says Jonas. So, they mostly remain off the books. Another gaping data hole is forest fires, says Yona. Globally, wildfires emit around 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually, more than all but the world’s top five CO2 emitters. Wildfires may be a natural hazard, but in many countries, they are mostly ignited by humans and are often made worse by poor fire management and fuel left in harm’s way. That makes them anthropogenic, she argues. So, the resulting CO2 emissions should feature in national inventories of human-caused emissions. But mostly they don’t.

Thus, California’s wildfire emissions have in some years been as great as those from the state’s power stations. But the state government excludes them from its greenhouse-gas inventories, “even though they are large, measurable, reducible and overwhelmingly caused by human activity,” Yona says.

The problem of underreporting is compounded because, according to the public online record, many non-Annex 1 nations have been extremely slow in meeting their requirement to submit inventories every four years. Some backsliders are states at war or with unstable governments. Syria last filed in 2010, Myanmar in 2012, Haiti in 2013, and Libya has never filed. But others have no such excuse. The Philippines last sent its inventory in 2014, and Guyana in 2012.

Most startling is Qatar — a major Gulf natural-gas exporter with per-capita emissions widely regarded as the highest in the world. At more than 35 tons of CO2 per person, Qataris emit more than twice as much as Americans. But their government has only filed a formal inventory of those emissions once, in 2011, and provided data for 2007. Since then, Qatar’s actual emissions are thought to have almost doubled.

The UNFCCC web page on reporting rules says: “Without transparency, we are left to act blindly.” But a spokesperson said in an email that the UNFCC had no ability to compel countries to submit timely inventories, which are a “non-mandatory requirement.” Moreover, the spokesperson noted, “most non-Aannex 1 parties face capacity constraints… including those for reporting.” Peters retorted that “Qatar could probably pay a team of 50 people to do the most accurate estimates of emissions ever, but it is not in their interests.”

Even when national returns are up to date and complete, uncertainties abound, says Efisio Solazzo, who studies pollution statistics for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy. There are shortcomings in “activity data.” We don’t know, for instance, how much fossil fuel is being burned in many countries, nor how much methane leaks from oil and gas fields and pipelines.

There are also uncertainties in how reliably those activities are converted into emissions estimates. This is normally done using off-the-shelf formulae developed by scientists for the U.N. But critics say these formulae often fail to reflect real operating conditions.