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2025 Historical NECD, Projections NECD, ESR and LULUCF reviews

1 June 2025

It’s been a busy few months for many of the Aether team as we are heavily involved in four reviews of European Member States’ (plus Norway and Iceland) air pollutant and greenhouse gas emission inventories that are being undertaken this summer. In addition, capacity building is also being offered to Countries where further support is required.

The work involves reviews of the historical air pollutant emissions inventories submitted under the EU’s NECD (National Emissions Ceilings Directive), air pollutant emission projections submitted under the NECD, greenhouse gas emission inventories submitted under the EU’s ESR (Effort Sharing Regulation) and LULUCF (land use, land use change and forestry) emission and removals reviews under the EU’s LULUCF Regulation.

The NECD aims to reduce air pollution and its associated risks to the environment and human health and thus to contribute to the 2030 targets of the Zero Pollution Action Plan. The NECD requires Member States to meet national emission reduction targets for selected pollutants (SO2, NOx, NMVOCs, NH3 and PM2.5) identified as being responsible for negative health impacts, acidification, eutrophication and ground-level ozone formation, with potential for transboundary impacts. The NECD defines national emission reduction commitments for the period 2020 to 20292 and more ambitious ones for 2030 and onwards. The Directive also requires that for 2025, Member States achieve a linear reduction between their emission levels defined by the emission reduction commitments for 2020 and the emission levels defined by the emission reduction commitments for 2030 or explain the reasons for deviating from this linear trajectory.

In addition to defining reduction commitments for the main pollutants and setting out reporting obligations for further pollutants and types of data, the NECD requires biennial reporting of emission projections, as well as the annual provision of an informative inventory report (IIR). All of this helps measuring the implementation of policies and measures (PaMs) in a more effective and transparent way.

For the ESR review, the primary objective of the project is to perform a comprehensive technical review of Member States’ (MS) greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories in 2025 to ensure that the Commission has accurate, reliable and verified information on annual GHG emissions for the years 2021 to 2023. This information will be used to determine the annual emission allocations for the years 2026 to 2030 under the Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR).

For the LULUCF review, the 2021-2023 time series of LULUCF emissions and removals have been reviewed, as the average of these years based on submission in 2025 and set in 2022 is the starting point of the linear trajectory to the 2030 LULUCF target to determine the budget for accounting of the period 2026-2029 (Article 4(4) of the LULUCF Regulation). The years 2016-2018 have also been important years for the checks, as their average is used to calculate the 2030 target, which is the end-point of the linear trajectory.

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