Germany

Historical emissions are taken from the official inventory data on greenhouse gas emissions in Germany for the years 1990-2019, published by the Federal Environment Agency and submitted to the UNFCCC in March 2021.

The current policy projections are based on two scenarios: one based on an update of the projection report (“Projektionsbericht”) published by the Federal Environment Agency in March 2020, which includes all measures that were agreed by 29 January 2020 including those of the Climate Action Programme (German Federal Environment Agency, 2020). The other scenario published on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) in March 2020 also quantifies the measures included in the Climate Action Programme (Kemmler et al., 2020). The figures were harmonized to the latest historical data from 2020.

To reflect the emissions reduction resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we then applied a novel method to estimate the COVID-19 related dip in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 and the deployment through to 2030. The uncertainty surrounding the severity and length of the pandemic creates a new level of uncertainty for current and future greenhouse gas emissions. We first update the current policy projections using most recent projections, as outlined above. We then distil the emission intensity (GHG emissions/GDP) from this pre-pandemic scenario and apply to it the most recent GDP projections that consider the effect of the pandemic.

To capture a wide range of possible future GDP developments, we usually use more than one GDP projection. For Germany we consider the projections from IMF, German Federal Bank and the OECD to reflect the full range of potential impacts (last updated: June 2021). If the most recent GDP projections only provide values for the next few years, we use the GDP growth until 2030 that was used as a basis for the original pre-pandemic current policy scenario.

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