Inventory of emissions of greenhouse gases in Israel

As a Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Israel is committed to develop a national inventory of anthropogenic emissions and removals of greenhouse gases. This paper presents the national inventory, which was developed according to the guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The inventory includes the following sectors: energy, industrial processes, agriculture, forestry and waste. In this paper, only the inventory of the direct greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O) is presented. Emissions of these gases were converted to CO₂ equivalent emissions by means of their Global Warming Potentials (a measure of the radiative effects of the different gases relatively to CO₂). CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels to produce energy rate by far the largest source (50 million tons in 1996). The contribution of methane emissions from decomposition of landfilled municipal solid waste is second in importance (8 million tons of CO₂ equivalent). Industrial processes emit about 2 million tons CO₂ equivalent, the most important process being cement production. Agricultural emissions amount to about 2 million tons CO₂ equivalent and are due to soil emissions of nitrous oxide, methane emissions from enteric fermentation in domestic livestock and N₂O and CH₄ emissions from animal waste management. Although most forest in Israel are in a growing stage and atmospheric CO₂ is therefore removed to form biomass, this removal amounts to 0.4 million tons only and is very small as compared to emissions from other sectors. On a per capita basis, Israel's emissions of CO₂ from fuel combustion are not far behind those of some of the most developed countries.