Abstract. Emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and removals from land, including both
anthropogenic and natural fluxes, require reliable quantification, including
estimates of uncertainties, to support credible mitigation action under the
Paris Agreement. This study provides a state-of-the-art scientific overview
of bottom-up anthropogenic emissions data from agriculture, forestry and
other land use (AFOLU) in the European Union (EU281). The data integrate
recent AFOLU emission inventories with ecosystem data and land carbon models
and summarize GHG emissions and removals over the period 1990–2016. This
compilation of bottom-up estimates of the AFOLU GHG emissions of European
national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs), with those of land carbon models
and observation-based estimates of large-scale GHG fluxes, aims at improving
the overall estimates of the GHG balance in Europe with respect to land GHG
emissions and removals. Whenever available, we present uncertainties, its
propagation and role in the comparison of different estimates. While NGHGI
data for the EU28 provide consistent quantification of uncertainty following
the established IPCC Guidelines, uncertainty in the estimates produced with
other methods needs to account for both within model uncertainty and the
spread from different model results. The largest inconsistencies between
EU28 estimates are mainly due to different sources of data related to
human activity, referred to here as activity data (AD) and methodologies
(tiers) used for calculating emissions and removals from AFOLU sectors. The
referenced datasets related to figures are visualized at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3662371 (Petrescu et al., 2020).
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