The 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories were approved by the IPCC session in April 2006 and have now been published and are now available at:

http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/

The 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories build on the previous Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines and the subsequent Good Practice reports in an evolutionary manner to ensure that moving from the previous guidelines to these new guidelines is as straightforward as possible. These new guidelines cover new sources and gases as well as updates to previously published methods where technical and scientific knowledge have improved.

This guidance assists countries in compiling complete, national inventories of greenhouse gases. The guidance has been structured so that any country, regardless of experience or resources, should be able to produce reliable estimates of their emissions and removals of these gases. In particular, default values of the various parameters and emission factors required are supplied for all sectors, so that, at its simplest, a country needs only supply national activity data. The approach also allows countries with more information and resources to use more detailed country-specific methodologies while retaining compatibility, comparability and consistency between countries. The guidance also integrates and improves earlier guidance on good practice in inventory compilation so that the final estimates are neither over- nor under-estimates as far as can be judged and uncertainties are reduced as far as possible.

Guidance is also provided to identify areas of the inventory whose improvement would most benefit the inventory overall. Hence limited resources can be focused on those areas most in need of improvement to produce the best practical inventory.

The 2006 Guidelines are the latest step in the IPCC development of inventory guidelines for national estimates of greenhouse gases. In the opinion of the authors, they provide the best, widely applicable default methodologies and, as such, are suitable for global use in compiling national greenhouse gas inventories.