Ethiopia

Ethiopia provided revised historical data for 2010 in its NDC update using global warming potential values (GWPs) from the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5) (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2021). The government provides sector-level emissions data, but no information on the gas-by-gas breakdown. It also provided information on emissions data from livestock and managed soils, which we take to be the entirety of agriculture sector emissions.

To complete the sector information for the industry and managed soils sectors, we used the sector-by-sector emission ratios for the NDC’s 2020 business as usual estimate. We use the gas-by-gas breakdown in PRIMAP for the year 2010 to estimate sectoral emissions by gas and then converted these from AR5 to AR4 values (Gütschow, J.; Günther, A.; Jeffery, L.; Gieseke, 2021).

The NDC update covers the three main gases (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O). We added an estimate for HFCs using PRIMAP data for 2010 and scaling this estimate to our industry sector’s emissions total for 2010.

We used PRIMAP growth rates for the energy, industry, agriculture, and waste to extend the historical time series for 1990-2019 based off of the 2010 estimate provided in the NDC update.

To estimate emissions for 2020 and 2021, we applied a sectoral approach. For energy and industry, we applied growth rates from Global Carbon Budget for the year 2020 (Global Carbon Project, 2021), and the GDP growth rates from IMF for 2021, assuming a directly proportional development of CO₂ emissions. For agriculture and waste, we assume a continuation of a 5-year trend. We assume that the impact of the pandemic on agriculture, waste and other emissions is minimal and so have extrapolated emissions for 2015–2019 up to 2021 using a 5-year average from historical emissions.

2030 NDC target

Ethiopia provides an estimate of each sector’s mitigation contribution to meeting its unconditional and conditional targets in its final NDC update submitted in July 2021 (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2021). These estimates are given using AR5 GWP values. We exclude the contribution of LULUCF, which we assume to be CO2 only, and then convert all other sector from AR5 to AR4 using the gas-by-gas breakdown for 2010 historic data from PRIMAP (Gütschow, J.; Günther, A.; Jeffery, L.; Gieseke, 2021).

The estimate provided in the final NDC update is for the main three gases only (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O). Our historical and current policy projections also include HFCs, however their contribution is very small and we have not taken it into account here.

We use a combination of data sources to estimate the lower bound of our current policy projection (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2021; IEA, 2019; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2019).

Lower bound projections

Our energy-related CO₂ emissions are based on growth rates from the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) for Ethiopia in the IEA’s Africa Energy Outlook 2019 (IEA, 2019). In general, neither the IEA Africa Energy Outlook 2019 report nor its annexes specify which of the policies have been included in the stated policies scenario. The IEA STEPS scenario was not updated in the IEA Africa Energy Outlook 2022 (IEA, 2022a).

For the industry sector, we used the business as usual (BAU) projections from the updated NDC harmonised to our 2021 historical emissions estimate.

For the agriculture and waste sectors, we used the US EPA’s non-CO₂ emissions projection but applied these to sector totals as the contribution from CO₂ in these sectors is negligible. For “other” emissions reported in PRIMAP (about 1% of emissions in 2019), we applied US EPA growth rates for N₂O as these “other” emissions only included N₂O.

Upper bound projections

The upper-bound of our current policy projection assumes that GHG emissions will grow according to the revised business as usual (BAU) scenario projections provided in the updated NDC of 2021 (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2021). The base year for the BAU scenario is 2010. We have harmonised the series to the last historical year estimate (2021). This approach could potentially overestimate emission levels as we do not have sufficient information on the state of emissions reduction efforts or current policy implementation, both of which might downward revise the trajectory.

The CAT uses Global Warming Potential (GWP) values from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) for all figures and time series. Assessments completed prior to December 2018 (COP24) used GWP values from the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (SAR).