Calculating residential carbon dioxide emissions—a new approach

All Annex 1 Parties are required to submit an annual national greenhouse gas inventory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change using the common report format. The inventory is to include a sectoral report for energy, listing different sectors and their associated greenhouse gas emissions (principally carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide). The sectors and their associated emissions can be used as a benchmark to show changes in emissions over time. In certain cases, these changes can be misleading, since an apparent emission reduction in one sector can result in a significant increase in the emissions of another, typically electricity production. Applying the emissions to the sector responsible for the final energy demand (as opposed to the sector that generates the energy) allows researchers and policy makers to develop reduction strategies that are targeted to the demand.This paper demonstrates this by removing the equivalent residential emissions from category A.1.a (Public Electricity and Heat Production) and applying them to category A.4.b (Residential) in Nova Scotia, a Canadian province that relies heavily on fossil fuels for electrical generation. The shift in emissions changes an apparent 4.1 percent decrease in Nova Scotiaʹs residential emissions between 1991 and 2001 to an 8.2 percent increase.