November 22, 2009

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Home > National System

National System

Environment Canada is responsible for monitoring and reporting on the state of the environment in Canada and for implementing international environmental agreements. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA 1999) is the legislative authority for Environment Canada to establish the National System under which Environment Canada’s Greenhouse Gas Division has been designated as the single national entity with responsibility for the preparation and submission of the Canadian national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals inventory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This National Communication, which includes a standardized National Inventory Report (NIR) and Common Reporting Format (CRF) tables is required to be submitted annually, on April 15.

The National System for estimating and reporting GHGs encompasses the institutional, legal and procedural arrangements necessary to ensure that Canada is able to meet its UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol inventory reporting obligations. International reporting rules require that accurate inventories are prepared in accordance with the principles of transparency, completeness, consistency and comparability and that proper quality control and quality assurance procedures are implemented and documented to facilitate third party review.

The Greenhouse Gas Division assumes a number of key inventory planning, preparation, and management functions. One of them is to define specific responsibilities in the inventory development process, and to allocate certain responsibilities to other agencies as required . As such, Environment Canada has a variety of arrangements with data providers, expert contributors and partners to develop and obtain the most accurate and up to date technical and scientific information and data. Major partners include Statistics Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada.

The National System takes an integrated and systematic approach to managing inventory quality, working towards continuously improving GHG estimates. This ensures that Canada’s national inventory is credible, defensible, and stands the test of an external review.