Quarterly greenhouse gas emissions release now official

Greenhouse gas emissions (industry and household): December 2021 quarter is being released as an official statistic for the first time, following five experimental releases, to provide timelier emissions statistics, Stats NZ said today.

“These quarterly statistics are produced using the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA) framework, which is an internationally recognised statistical framework specifically designed to allow environmental data to be directly compared against economic data,” environmental economic accounts manager Stephen Oakley said.

In addition to enabling meaningful comparisons to be made between New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions and our economic output, using the SEEA approach also allows the provision of:

• timelier emissions information to be released, approximately six months after the reference period
• ongoing reports over the course of the year allowing turning points to be identified with greater accuracy
• breakdowns of emissions by industry groups and households
• more up-to-date information for policy makers to support a just transition to a low emissions economy.

The elevation of quarterly emissions statistics from experimental to official represents a significant achievement, with only two other National Statistics Offices (Sweden and the Netherlands) routinely producing quarterly emissions statistics under the SEEA framework.

These quarterly emissions statistics provide a timely leading indicator for New Zealand’s greenhouse gas profile, released approximately six months after the reference period and designed to complement the Ministry for the Environment’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory. The Greenhouse Gas Inventory is New Zealand’s official report on emissions required by the Paris Agreement and reported annually to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“The value of producing quarterly emissions statistics is becoming increasingly well recognised with, for example, the International Monetary Fund recently adding quarterly emissions to its climate change indicators dashboard. These higher frequency quarterly statistics allow timely comparisons to be made to quarterly gross domestic product (qGDP),” Mr Oakley said.

As a result, businesses and decision-makers can quickly identify what emissions path the economy is on, and whether emissions are reducing as long-term economic growth is maintained.

Note: An index line graph allows movements in data series with different scales to be easily compared. Indexing sets the initial value of each data series to 1000, and subsequent points reflect the percentage change since the initial value.

Moving the quarterly emissions statistics to Stats NZ’s official release calendar follows 18 months of development, stakeholder feedback, and improvement to create statistics that are accurate, robust, and fit for purpose. This provides more certainty about the ongoing production of the quarterly emissions statistics and ensures their frequency is established on the release calendar.

The quarterly publication complements Stats NZ’s suite of SEEA-based emissions statistics including annual industry and household production, consumption, tourism, and regional emissions statistics. Using the quarterly methodology also allows for provisional annual emissions statistics to be published approximately six months after the end of the year. These annual statistics will then be used to provide more up-to-date regional emissions information to be released in September 2022.

See Greenhouse gas emissions (industry and household): December 2021 quarter for key results from the release.