National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS)
What is NCAS?
Australia's National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) is a world-leading system to account for greenhouse gas emissions from land based sectors.
Land based emissions (sources) and removals (sinks) of greenhouse gases form a major part of Australia's emissions profile. Around 27 per cent of Australia's human-induced greenhouse gas emissions come from activities such as livestock and crop production, land clearing and forestry. The removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by forests provides an important greenhouse sink.
The NCAS accounts for these activities through a highly integrated system that combines:
- remotely sensed land cover change (including mapped information from thousands of satellite images)
- land use and management data
- climate and soil data
- greenhouse gas accounting tools, and
- spatial and temporal ecosystem modelling.
