Story at a glance:
- Countries have been misreporting emissions for about a decade.
- More than 5 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions were underreported.
- The confusion largely stems from nations claiming cuts to their emissions that are actually forests sucking carbon dioxide out of the air..
There is a 5.5-billion-ton gap between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that countries are acknowledging and the emissions calculated by independent models, an accounting error that is shaking the foundations of how the world will fix climate change, The Washington Post reports.
While there are highly technical reasons for the gap, according to Washington Post reporters, the largest problem comes from countries claiming they’re reducing their annual emissions, when in reality their greenhouse gas emissions are from forests sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
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This is making it difficult to determine whether or not countries were meeting their individual climate goals because they were not correctly inputting information.
“There is a gap of 5.5 gigatons of CO2, which is a huge gap,” said Giacomo Grassi, a forest expert at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and lead author of the study, published Monday in Nature Climate Change. “This gap is quite new.”
Between 2005 and 2015, Grassi and fellow scientists discovered that some countries were not accurately reporting detailed information about their emissions to the United Nations, including those related to their forests and other land use.
“It’s like if the navigation system provides information in miles, and the car dashboard in kilometers,” Grassi, one of 22 authors from countries all around the world, such Italy, Japan and the United States, said.
As the Washington Post reported, the misinformation dampers any further agreement with world leaders next year. Under the Paris agreement, the world nations assemble to review and assess the climate change situation and determine if the world is on track to cut its emissions enough to stay in line with the agreement’s goals.
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