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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to well below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C, while ensuring the climate resilience and sustainability of food production systems. This is an enormous challenge, and its success depends on the implementation of climate policies at the national level and the commitment of all countries and sectors, with an increasingly important role for agriculture and forestry (AFOLU).Against this background, the pan-European Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs) "Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change" (FACCE-JPI) and "Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe" (JPI Climate) have been collaborating in order to identify opportunities to produce the knowledge needed to improve national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories from agriculture and associated land use to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement reporting and accounting processes. National GHG inventories are central to climate policy and their ongoing development is a key science-policy interface. This is recognized in the Tier system used to categorise elements of the national inventories. Tier 1 is based on international/regional default data provided by the IPCC, whereas Tier 3 is based on the best available science. Tier 2 is an intermediate stage in which national data are used to determine GHG emissions and removals, through methodology that is internationally agreed upon by IPCC1.In the context of this collaboration, FACCE-JPI and JPI Climate organised a workshop on the use of emerging science to improve agricultural GHG inventories for the UNFCCC reporting, which took place in Brussels, on 19 and 20 October 2022. The workshop brought together around 50 participants – national inventory compilers, agricultural emissions experts, and policy makers – to discuss the state of the art, research needs, and the use of emerging science to improve agricultural GHG inventories. The aim was to start a discussion and to solidify a network around the improvement of GHG inventories in Europe, particularly having a vision for a Tier 3 system in Europe driven by combined data and modelling approaches.The key messages from the workshop included:• The impacts of farming practices targeting the environment and climate are not sufficiently detailed in GHG emission inventories, which may jeopardize using GHG inventories to measure the success of current and future climate and agricultural policies.• High-resolution Earth Observation data have a significant potential to characterize important aspects of land-use and land-management at parcel level, but these data do not measure the resulting carbon fluxes and changes in carbon stocks, for which models are needed.• There is a need to develop a concerted and systematic Europe-wide community approach towards integrated modelling of agricultural emissions/removals – from data collection to using these data in models and GHG emission sources and sinks.1 https://www.ipcc.ch/working-group/tfi/3• A key element for the successful implementation of a potential Tier 3 approach at a country level or Europe-wide is the development of interactive data collection tools that 1) are consistent with the GHG emissions in inventories in a harmonized way and 2) also provide feedback to the management practices implemented by the farmer.The limits and challenges for the use of national GHG inventories in supporting policy developments, and interventions at higher spatial and temporal levels, warrant further exploration.An ongoing engagement process involving researchers and compilers on this matter was proposed as a next step. This could take the form of a regular forum where the two communities can come together to exchange best practices and co-design research to improve agricultural GHG inventories for the UNFCCC reporting. The Governing Boards of JPI Climate and FACCE-JPI will be invited to take note of the outcomes and key messages from this workshop and to consider next steps in this collaboration. |
