ABSTRACT
Official inventories, which were developed systematically after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into force, analyse emissions taking place in a particular territory. The territory-based approach has a more robust methodology than the "footprint" approach, and it has also been chosen for emissions inventories for companies participating in the European carbon market. This chapter deals with the guidelines and the principles of carbon accounting developed within the framework of the system. Following the example of the UNFCCC, a territory-based approach was chosen, although companies have to calculate and limit only their direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guidelines for national inventories propose methodologies to estimate national inventories of anthropogenic GHG emissions by sources and absorption by sinks. The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is the only dataset containing facility-level GHG emissions data from large industrial sources across the United States.
