IPCCretningslinjer

IPCCretningslinjer, short for IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, are technical methodological guidance developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to support governments in estimating and reporting greenhouse gas emissions and removals as part of national inventories under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The guidelines aim to ensure consistency, transparency, and comparability of national estimates across countries and over time, enabling international assessment and policy analysis.

The scope covers the major sectors that together determine national GHG balances: Energy; Industrial Processes and Product Use (IPPU); Agriculture; Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF); and Waste. The guidelines describe methods for calculating emissions and removals, including data requirements, activity data, emission factors, and tiered estimation approaches. They also provide guidance on uncertainty assessment, quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC), documentation, and reporting formats. They include recommendations on selecting global warming potentials and converting emissions to CO2-equivalents.

Publication and updates: The guidelines originated in the 1990s, with the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories serving as the core framework and followed by refinements, most recently the 2019 Refinement to update methods and sectoral guidance. Countries use them to prepare national inventories submitted under the UNFCCC, as well as national communications and Biennial Transparency Reports. While adoption is voluntary at the global level, the IPCC guidelines are widely regarded as the international standard for inventory methodology and reporting.