United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

The international community responded to growing concerns about climate change by putting in place three key international treaties: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol to UNFCCC, and the Paris Agreement under UNFCCC. Reporting on GHG emissions, including emissions from the energy sector, is a key obligation of the Parties to these treaties [IRES, Ch. XI, para. 11.37, PDF p. 155, 2018].

Role in mandating the IPCC Guidelines

The 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories were prepared at the invitation of UNFCCC. Per decision 24/CP.19 of the Conference of the Parties to UNFCCC (Warsaw, Poland, 11–23 November 2013), Annex I Parties to UNFCCC are required to use the 2006 IPCC Guidelines in their national GHG inventory submissions from 2015. There is no formal decision on use of the 2006 IPCC Guidelines by non-Annex I Parties to date, but some developing countries have started using the Guidelines in preparing national submissions on climate change, and it is likely that more will follow [IRES, Ch. XI, para. 11.39, PDF p. 155, 2018]. See IPCC for the full lineage of the Guidelines this decision applies to, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Box 11.1) for the estimation methods the Guidelines set out.

confidence: medium, scoped to this role — this page covers only UNFCCC’s appearance in IRES Chapter XI as the treaty framework (with the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement) that invited and mandates the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for Annex I Parties from 2015. UNFCCC’s own institutional structure, Conference of the Parties process and broader treaty content are not drawn from the source and may be expanded if a document treating UNFCCC directly enters the corpus.

Related

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the body UNFCCC invited to prepare the 2006 Guidelines, and whose earlier Guidelines lineage (1996–2003) preceded them
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions — the concept page covering the climate-change background (1979 First World Climate Conference through the Paris Agreement) and the GHG estimation methods the UNFCCC-mandated Guidelines set out
• IRES Chapter XI — Uses of Basic Energy Statistics and Balances — the Chapter XI digest this page supports (Section D)