The UK, Italy and the Netherlands have under-reported emissions of a potent greenhouse gas, a study suggests.
The study says that western European countries produce twice as much HFC-23 gas, known as fluoroform, as they declare overall.
Signatories of the Kyoto protocol self-report greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Countries producing emissions above sanctioned levels may be subject to disciplinary action.
Although the UNFCCC reviews all submissions there are no independent checks on whether declarations are genuine, say researchers from Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, who published the study in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month.
However, new measuring equipment and climate modeling software allowed the Empa scientists to trace the source of elevated atmospheric fluoroform.
Italy is the worst offender, producing 10 to 20 times more fluoroform gas than it reports to the international monitor.
The impact of unreported fluoroform emission apparently produced by a factory in Italy over one year is equivalent to the annual CO2 emission of a town of 75,000 people.
Stefan Reimann, the study’s lead author at Empa, told Research Europe: “In itself, it’s not comparable with the impact of [global] CO2 emissions. But it’s a little disturbing that Europe, as one of the most developed regions in the world, is not able to perform a good estimation of its greenhouse gas emissions.”
In a written statement to Research Europe, the Italian environmental agency Ispra countered the study’s claim that no independent checks are performed on emission declarations.
National greenhouse gas emission estimates “are reviewed every year by a team of experts indicated by the UNFCCC Secretariat,” Ispra wrote.
“We consider at the moment the estimate suggested by Empa not consistent with the available information about the source of HFC-23 emission,” the agency said, adding that “the case is […] already under examination.”
Fluoroform is mostly produced as a by-product of HCFC-22, a cooling and foaming agent used to manufacture Teflon. It has a global warming potential 15,000 greater than that of CO2 and an atmospheric half-life of 270 years.