About the National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS)
FACT SHEET
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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.
NCAS development
The NCAS was established in 1998 to provide a complete accounting and forecasting system for human-induced sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions from Australian land based activities.It has been developed over several phases with its implementation driven largely by Australian Government policy and international reporting priorities. This approach has addressed the reporting capability for:
- the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change National Greenhouse Gas Inventories and Kyoto Protocol baselines
- tracking of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from the land sector, and
- projections of future emission trends.
A derivative of the NCAS – the National Carbon Accounting Toolbox (NCAT) – allows carbon accounting from land based activities at the project level. The NCAT is available free of charge, and allows users to track carbon dioxide emissions and removals using the same data and modelling that is used to create Australia’s national greenhouse accounts.
Future directions
The NCAS is currently designed to account for carbon emissions from land based activities to meet national and international reporting requirements, as well as the project level through the NCAT. Ongoing development of the NCAS and the NCAT is focused on improving the capabilities of the system to account for non-carbon dioxide emissions such as methane and nitrous oxide from land based activities.
The NCAT is being further developed to improve its usability and provide low-cost project level greenhouse gas accounts.
The extension of the NCAS into the international arena includes a collaborative approach with the Clinton Climate Initiative. This project aims to use the NCAS as a base for developing a global carbon monitoring system that can assist in recognising sustainable forestry and reforestation within global carbon markets.
