A UK GREENHOUSE-GAS INVENTORY - ON ESTIMATING ANTHROPOGENIC AND NATURAL SOURCES AND SINKS

The Climate Change Convention requires signatory countries to calculate inventories of greenhouse-gas emissions from anthropogenic activities, and from natural sources and sinks. This paper presents estimations for the Ut(, an industrialized temperate country with intensive land-use and little natural vegetation cover. The UK's 1988 anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions total 183 million tons (metric). When the net sequestration from soil and biomass is included in aggregate carbon dioxide emissions, this total is reduced by only 0.72%. Net emissions increase however for methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) from the land-use sector. There is a need for a clear definition of the distinction between natural and anthropogenic sources where the capacity of the biosphere to act as a sink is limited by human intervention, In the method adopted here, distinction is made between emissions from activities not associated with biological activity, defined as anthropogenic, and exclusively from biological processes, with or without human intervention. The relative contributions of the different gases is also significantly affected by the time horizon, and hence the assumed global warming potential adopted for the analysis.