Lyck, E., Nielsen, M., O.-K., Nielsen, Winther, M., Hoffmann, L. & Thomsen M. 2009: Indicators for Danish Greenhouse Gas Emissions from 1990 to 2007. National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University. 94 pp. – NERI Technical Report No 754.
As a consequence of EU decisions no. 280/2004/EC and 2005/166/EC, the EU member states have been obligated to report indicators to the Commission since 2005. The indicators are to be reported annually on January 15 in year X for the year X-2. The reporting is to occur in parallel with the obligations to report greenhouse gases according to the decisions mentioned.
The decisions have been taken under the EU Monitoring Mechanism, which is about reporting of greenhouse gas inventories for the implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol (KP). However, the obligations under the UNFCCC and KP do not include reporting of indicators. The former obligations under the Monitoring Mechanism did not include obligations to report indicators. So reporting of indicators is a new obligation and is subject to evaluation.
In this report all 28 indicators have been considered for years 1990-2007, while the obligations up till now only has been for reporting 2004-2007. The 28 indicators are distributed with two macro indicators, 16 energy related indicators and 10 industry related indicators. Data for all indicators but one have been established.
The data for the indicators for emissions of greenhouse gases have mostly been data direct from the Common Reporting Format (CRF) used for reporting to the UNFCCC. Where data from CRF could not be used directly, data have been aggregated from databases being the foundation for the CRF format data. For the economic data for the indicators the source is Eurostat and building data are from Statistics Denmark. The data for the indicators for the transport sector are supported by data from the Danish Road Directorate and Statistics Denmark. Data for emissions of greenhouse gases are as reported to the EU March 15, 2009 for 1990-2007. The data for indicators in this report for 2004-2007 are consistent with the data for indicators reported to EU January 15, 2009.
The results from analysing the most important indicators, choosing for this summary one indicator for national emission, one for the industry sector and one for the transport sector, respectively, are the following. The indicator of the national emission over GDP shows that the steady increase in gross domestic product is decoupled from the trend of the Danish national emissions of CO2, since the indicator (the emissions divided by the GDP) decreased by 23-30 % in 2005-2007 relative to 1990. The national emission is heavily dominated by the energy sector and the most important reasons for the trend and the decoupling are a more efficient energy production, a shift to less CO2 emitting fuels and increased use of biomass fuels. Here, it is important to note that Danish operated international transport activities contribute to GDP, while the obligations to report greenhouse gases do not include these activities. Thereby an unknown part of the decrease of this indicator may be due to growth in the sector of international transportation. It has been beyond the scope of this study to further analyse the influence of international transportation. A report by Statistics Denmark (2009) represents such a study, e.g. the CO2 contribution from Danish operated ships and aeroplanes in international transport has been calculated.The indicator of CO2 emission from the industry sector over gross value added shows a decrease from 1996 to 2007 after slightly fluctuating levels for the years 1990 to 1996. This trend is a result of a rather steady increase of gross value added of industry, in 2007 27 % above the 1990 level, simultaneously with an increase of CO2 emission by 5 % only. Thus, as for the macro indicator there is a decoupling, where the change to lower emitting fuels plays a role probably interplaying with the changes in industry structure towards less energy demanding industry. The indicator of CO2 emissions from passenger cars over number of kilometres shows only a slight decoupling effect since the steady increase of 44 % from 1990 to 2007 in total mileage is accompanied by a 37 % increase in CO2 emissions. This causes the indicator in 2007 to be at 95 % of the 1990 level. This trend is mainly due to an improvement of the average fuel efficiency for passenger cars dominated by a gradual shift from gasoline driven to diesel driven passenger cars.
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