Uncertainties from the UNFCCC National Inventory Reports (submission 2017)

Summary:

This data repository contains the uncertainties of the national greenhouse-gas inventories submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We extracted the data from the National Inventory Reports (NIR) submitted in 2017 covering the emission from 2015. We use the data in our study on "Estimating the uncertainty of the greenhouse gas extensions in Multi-Regional Input-Output analysis" submitted to the Journal of Earth System Science Data (ESSD): https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-473/

Background:

NIRs are only available in pdf-format which makes accessing them from computer impossible. Against this background, we extracted the uncertainty tables from the Annex of the NIR pdf documents in a semi-automated way using a set of Python and R scripts. To bring the uncertainty into a common format, manual data cleaning and adjustments were necessary due to different structuring and processing of uncertainty data by the parties. 

Data: 

We brought the data into the format provided in the IPCC 2006 guidelines (Volume 1, Chapter 3). The guidelines distinguish two approaches to uncertainty quantification, tier 1 based on analytical error propagation, and tier 2 based on Monte-Carlo simulations. For each, tier 1 and tier 2 uncertainties, the IPCC 2006 guidelines provide a distinct table template, a screenshot of which can be found in this repository under IPCC2006_table3-2 and IPCC2006_table3-3.

Accordingly we provide two different data sets: 

• tier1.csv containing the Tier 1 uncertainties structured according to Table 3.2 of the IPCC 2006 guidelines (see IPCC2006_table3-2)
• tier2.csv containing the Tier 2 uncertainties structured according to Table 3.2 of the IPCC 2006 guidelines (see IPCC2006_table3-3)

Compared to the table templates from the IPCC 2006 guidelines we added three identifying columns to each dataset: 

• party: Name of the party
• year: Inventory year (2015 for all items)
• LULUCF: if emissions from Land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) are included (incl) or excluded (excl) in the inventory. Background: parties often publish two versions of the uncertainty table: One including emissions from Land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF), one excluding.

Moreover, we split the column A into two columns category and classification and renamed the original column A  into A_raw.