Greenhouse data a challenge

COLLECTION of data for green-house gas (GHG) inventories and other reports continue to remain a big challenge in PNG because data and statistics are not readily available or published by the government, Takeshi Enoki says.
Enoki, who is the team leader of Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) project on green-house gas inventories in Papua New Guinea, expressed this during a consultative workshop on PNG’s first biennial update report (BUR) in Port Moresby yesterday.
“The challenges for preparing the biennial update report is mostly data collection and that is true in any country when preparing the green-house gas inventories or any climate-change report,” he said.
“There are not many statistics available in Papua New Guinea and not many published reports here in the country, so what we have to do is to, for example, in some sectors, we will have to go to some provinces to develop statistics from the bottom up.
“Whereas in some countries like Japan, they already have the data collection system where the central government collects data from provinces and publishes these statistics,” Enoki said.
He said the inventory agency just needed to have access to the National Statistics Office, for example, and use those numbers and estimate emissions.
“Sometimes this is not possible in developing countries and is also true in Papua New Guinea ,” Enoki said.
He said there were sometimes conflicting data sets which makes their job challenging.
“Different agencies may be collecting the same data so what we need to do is to test the scope of the statistics developed and to understand the scope and limitations of the statistics and you might have to use the appropriate data to estimate the emissions and removals of green-house gas emissions.
“So the challenge really is with data collection because data is not readily available in Papua New Guinea,” Enoki said.