EXERCISE 5: TIME SERIES CONSISTENCY

A useful approach for identifying potential problems in a Party’s inventory submission is to examine emission indicators and trends in these indicators. One such indicator used in the Common Reporting Format (CRF) and the Synthesis and Assessment (S&A) report is the implied emission factor (IEF) {IEF = emissions / activity data}. You can use this data to examine the time series consistency of a Party’s submission by examining changes in each data element over time. Part I of the S&A report contains similar trend tables with percent changes for individual source categories. However, to look in detail, you should examine trends at the sub-category level and within activity data and IEFs as well as emissions.

The following question examines the time series consistency of reported data from cattle on CH₄ emissions from enteric fermentation and manure management. In order to complete this exercise you will need to use the UNFCCC Locator tool. Once you have opened the Locator tool, complete the following steps for Austria, New Zealand, and Greece and paste the data for both categories in separate spreadsheets:

• Extract tables with annual CH₄ emissions from cattle for the entire time series.
• Extract tables with activity data values for the entire time series.
• Extract tables with implied emission factor values for CH₄ for the entire time series.

Once you have all this time series data in a spreadsheet for the three Parties, you should next transform it into relative values to get changes between consecutive years (i.e., [Xt+1 - Xt]/Xt*100, where X is the original data value and t is the year of the data). When finished you should have two sets of three tables with relative annual changes in emissions, activity data, and implied emission factors (see Table 4.3 in Part I of the S&A report for an example of such a table using aggregate CH₄ emissions from enteric fermentation).

1. For which Party and sub-category can you identify issues that could be a potential time series inconsistency problem using the data in the tables you have constructed?

1. Austria and enteric fermentation
2. New Zealand and both enteric fermentation and manure management
3. Greece and manure management
4. a and b above
5. b and c above
6. None of the above