Making It Count: Bridging the Gap between GHG Mitigation Practices and GHG Inventories.

Management practices associated with livestock production are very dynamic. In order to account for improvements in management practices, it is important to consider the process of updating inventory-scale GHG emission calculations. If the methodology used at the inventory-level is not responsive to a new mitigation practice, or if the data that quantifies how management practices have changed are unavailable, then the benefits are not officially counted. In other words, if every livestock operation in the country adopted a mitigation practice to reduce their emissions, the officially reported emissions would not change. Maintaining a responsive inventory ensures that temporal changes in the livestock management are reflected, and that carbon footprint estimates and other analyses agree with the inventory. Capturing changing emission trends may require the use of data proxies, relative difference approaches or other creative techniques to incorporate measured data into simplified large scale emission models. In this presentation some opportunities and challenges of aligning mitigation practices and inventories are explored, using the Canadian national inventory methodology for manure management emissions as an example.