Te whakarāpopototanga tuihono o Te Rārangi Haurehu Kati Mahana a Aotearoa 1990–2019 New Zealand's Greenhouse Gas Inventory Snapshot 1990–2019

The Inventory measures New Zealand’s progress against obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. The Inventory adheres to the UNFCCC reporting guidelines and the international methodology guidelines set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Inventory contains information about sectors (Agriculture, Energy, Industrial Processes and Product Use (IPPU), Waste, Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) and Other (Tokelau), as well as Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry under the Kyoto Protocol (KP-LULUCF)).

The Ministry for the Environment is the lead agency responsible for producing the Inventory, but preparing and compiling the Inventory is a cross-government effort. The Inventory report is submitted about 15 months after the end of the calendar year being reported on, providing time for the data to be collected, processed and analysed.

New Zealand’s Inventory data are used for both international and domestic reporting. The Inventory informs New Zealand’s policy recommendations on climate change and enables monitoring of progress towards emissions reduction targets.

To learn more about how New Zealand reports and measures progress towards our targets and other emissions reporting, go to our webpage on New Zealand’s emissions reduction targets.

The greenhouse gas emissions covered in the Inventory include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases.

The Inventory follows a process of continuous improvement. The whole Inventory time series, from the base year (1990) to the latest year, is recalculated when the methodology or underlying data change. This means the emissions estimates are only up to date in the latest Inventory, and previous inventories are not useful for comparisons. Changes made to the Inventory are often related to improvements in activity data collection, emission factors and methodology, or the identification of additional emission sources.

Read the long description for Breakdown of New Zealand’s gross greenhouse gas emissions by sector and gas type in 2019

Figure 1 is a horizontal bar graph that shows a breakdown of New Zealand’s gross greenhouse gas emissions by sector and gas type in 2019. Emissions and gases are represented in percentages.

In particular, it shows:

• The Industrial Processes and Product Use sector was responsible for 6 per cent of gross emissions
• The Energy sector was responsible for 42 per cent of gross emissions, with sub-categories of transport, other energy, and electricity making up 20 per cent, 17 per cent, and 5 per cent of gross emissions respectively.
• The Waste sector was responsible for 4 per cent of gross emissions.
• The Agriculture sector was responsible for 48 per cent of gross emissions.
• The emissions contribution from Tokelau at 0.005% of gross emissions was too small to be included in the figure.

Clouds are used to represent the breakdown of greenhouse gases by type in 2019. In particular, it shows:

• Synthetic greenhouse gases entirely from the Industrial Processes and Product Use sector made up 2 per cent of gross greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.
• Carbon dioxide (CO₂) made up 46 per cent of gross greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, mainly from the Energy sector.
• Methane (CH4) made up 42 per cent of gross greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, mainly from the Waste and Agriculture sectors.
• Nitrous oxide (N2O) made up 10 per cent of gross greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, mainly from the Agriculture sector.