Greenhouse gas inventories for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland



This report presents estimates of greenhouse gas emission inventories for the devolved administrations of the UK. Separate greenhouse gas emission inventories were estimated for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the years 1990, 1995 and 1998. The gases reported are:
  • Carbon dioxide
  • Methane
  • Nitrous Oxide
  • Hydrofluorocarbons
  • Perfluorocarbons
  • SF6
The estimates are consistent with the 1998 UK Greenhouse Gas Inventory (Salway, 2000) and hence the UNFCCC reporting guidelines. Some emissions mainly mobile and offshore sources could not be allocated to any region, so an extra unallocated category was used to report these.

Where possible the same methodology was used to calculate the regional emissions as for the UK Inventory. However, it was found that the data available for regional emission sources were less detailed than for the UK, and in some cases were not available. In particular, complete sets of fuel consumption data could not be found for England, Wales and Scotland. In order to make emission estimates, it was necessary to supplement the available fuel consumption data with surrogate statistics. These included, plant capacities, boiler capacities, employment statistics and production of industrial products. These were used to estimate regional emissions from the UK emission. There were fewer problems in obtaining data in the other major categories: industrial processes; agriculture; land-use change and forestry; and waste disposal. Here a representative set of regional data was available though with less detail than for the UK. As a result of these data problems the regional estimates are more uncertain than the UK estimates.

The study showed that the distribution of regional greenhouse gas emissions expressed as global warming potentials in 1998 were: England, 74.0%; Scotland, 12.0%; Wales, 6.4%; Northern Ireland, 3.3%; unallocated, 4.3%.

This work was funded by Global Atmosphere Division, Department of Environment, the Scottish Executive, the National Assembly for Wales and in Northern Ireland, the Department of the Environment (Contract EPG/1/1/62). The land use change and forestry estimates were provided by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (Edinburgh) (Contract EPG/1/1/39)
You can download a pdf (postscript document format) version of the report below.
Main body of report(360 KB)
Appendix(125 KB)
You will need a version of Adobe Acrobat, or other software, capable of displaying pdf files.



Back to DETR Air Quality Reports Index