U.N. Climate panel releases new guidelines to calculate emissions

May 13, 2019

Kyoto--A U.N. climate panel on Monday released new guidelines to help countries calculate their greenhouse gas emissions more accurately.

The guidelines were adopted at a general meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that ended in the western Japan city of Kyoto on Sunday.

The purpose of the guidelines is to enhance the transparency of the process for both developed and developing countries to report the amount of emissions, a move that would help achieve the goal set out under the

Paris Agreement adopted at the end of 2015, Lee Hoesung, chair of the panel, said at a press conference.

The Paris climate pact seeks to keep the global temperature rise to below two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The new guidelines include a calculation method that utilizes satellites, a technology in which Japan leads the world. A gas-observing satellite launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and others last October was introduced in the guidelines.

Japan is pushing the technology in a bid to demonstrate its efforts to fight global warming ahead of the Group of 20 summit in the western city of Osaka at the end of June.

Currently, countries mainly use guidelines, compiled in 2006, that call for estimating the amount of emissions of carbon dioxide and methane gas based on statistics.

In some developing countries, however, such statistics are insufficient. The new guidelines enable those countries to measure missions more accurately by comparing figures obtained with the use of satellites and their own data.

The new guidelines also included methods to calculate emissions from the production of hydrogen, regarded as the next-generation energy source, and rare earth, used as raw materials for technology products. Jiji Press