US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and China Sign Memorandum of Cooperation on Greenhouse Gas Inventories

There is finally a story on page A12 of the Washington Post on what is probably one of the most important agreements signed during the President’s recent visit to China — an agreement for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to work with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and specifically NDRC’s Energy Research Institute (ERI) on greenhouse gas inventories. As we reported on this three days ago, the major focus of this capacity-building program is to help China systematize the collection and reporting of its emissions data. China produced a GHG inventory almost a decade ago for its first national communication to the UNFCCC. Unfortunately, as with many developing countries, the inventory was conducted as a one-time effort that didn’t leave in place systems that would enable the emissions data to be regularly updated and reported. As a result, China is now in the midst of a massive effort to prepare its second national communication. The hope is that the second report will be developed in such a way that there will be systems in place to make future reporting easier and more regular. This particular problem is not unique to China, and hopefully through this cooperative effort EPA will be able to learn and communicate some lessons that might help other countries implement systems for regular collection and analysis of emission data.

See the text of the MOC here, in our Library and Data Section.