Recommendations from the Stage 3 Trial Review

1. Recommendations from the Stage 3 Trial Review Karin Kindbom 7th Joint TFEIP & EIONET meeting 31 October-2 November, Thessaloniki, Greece

2. Outline • What has been done? • Stage 3 review experiences and discussions from Review Expert Panel meeting in Amersfoort, June 2006 (16th TFEIP meeting) • Recommendations

3. What has been done so far? • A trial stage 3 centralised review was agreed at the 6th joint TFEIP/EIONET meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, October 2005. Parties were asked to voluntarily take part. • The trial centralised review was performed in late February 2006. • Review Expert Panel meeting in Amersfoort, June 2006, discussing experiences from the trial centralised review. • The trial review and experiences are documented in Chapter 4 of “Inventory review 2006”, EMEP Technical Report MSC-W 1/2006.

4. Overall objective of the trial stage 3 review • To gain experience with in-depth review within the framework of the LRTAP Convention; • assess the usefulness of the present Guidelines and the Emission Inventory Guidebook • assess value added from a stage 3 review over stages 1&2 • test and clarify procedures, scope and management

5. Trial centralised review: outputs • Individual review conclusions and recommendations for each participating Party • communicated back only to the Party • Feedback on the process to theTask Force • as feedback on the reporting and review process • as a basis for discussions on future development of the review process • The work was carried out with ETC-ACC support

6. Experiences and discussions: Usefulness of Guidelines for review purposes • Clear guidance regarding what criteria to review against necessary in order to be able to assess completeness. • An IIR is necessary for review purposes and should be made mandatory; level of detail? • needs to suit review and provide transparency • everything cannot be in IIR • if more info in the IIR, review will provide better feedback • Activity data that can be used in verifying emissions should be made available. • A number of recommendations for the reporting template to improve the comparability, transparency and consistency of data reported by countries.

7. Experiences and discussions: Usefulness of Guidebook for review purposes • GB discussion extensive • for key categories and pollutants GB generally OK for review • not strong enough, inadequate for review purposes for some pollutants/categories • need clear default methods to review against • need to distinguish need for inventory compilers and inventory reviewers • useful for completeness, i.e. to identify sources of pollutants • is it possible to have GB suited both for compliance and improvement?

8. Recommendations: Guidelines and Guidebook • A number of items identified from the review as problematic already fed into: • the Guidelines revision process, • the planned Guidebook improvement.

9. Experiences and discussions: Usefulness of stage 1&2, value added from stage 3 • Stage 1&2 review very useful input to the detailed review and an excellent way of giving feedback to countries. • A number of benefits from participating in a Stage 3 review, for the countries being reviewed and for the experts participating in the review. • Stage 3 provides country specific feedback and recommendations to help in prioritisation and inventory improvement, • A deeper assessment of comparability possible in Stage 3 review, e.g. methodologies and emission factors used.

10. Recommendation: Review stages • Review Stages 1, 2 and 3 are all valuable and useful and should be retained

11. Experiences and discussions: Purpose of stage 3 review • Objective of the review must be clear • validation (good enough, GL) • verification (numbers make sense?) • Expectations on individual review reports/review process • to be used as lever for resources • help prioritising funding/inventory improvement • sharing of best practice and information across countries

12. Experiences and discussions: Procedures, scope and management • Centralised review is an efficient stage 3 model • Harmonisation with UNFCCC desirable but not possible to copy directly • LRTAP review process should be flexible enough to potentially focus on different issues in different years • Mandate, roles and responsibilities to be defined for participating experts, for secretariat and administrative functions. • Mandate and procedures for communication; • for parties involved, which parties involved? • relation to policy processes? • Need for collaboration Convention/EU

13. Experiences and discussions: Timing and resource requirements • Timing and resource requirements depend on future review scope and focus. • Once established resource requirements might be lower. • Review process must be compatible with existing flow, not impose time consuming process.

14. Recommendation: Purpose, procedures, scope and management • Further work is needed

15. Recommended future steps • To develop structure for Stage 3 review during 2007, not perform another stage 3 review; • Methods and Procedures document lays down stage 3 review mandate, but scope is not elaborated • aim for end-2007, a more formal proposal for stage 3 review • an idea of resources needed to report to SB, output could be to perform review in 2008 • could consider providing a series of options to SB for their selection based on available resources