Glossary

Anthropogenic: related to human activities (industry, agriculture...).

Drying up: state of a river or pond that is without water.

Backloading: postponing the auctioning of 900 million ETS allowances to be put into circulation between 2014 and 2016 to the 2019-2020 period in order to absorb the surplus of allowances accumulated during Phase 1and 2. In the end, these allowances were not auctioned but transferred to the market stability reserve(see definition below).

UNFCCC: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

SMF: solid mineral fuels, i.e. coal and its derivatives. Emissions linked to the transformation of SMD are, for the most part, linked to the activity of coking plants.

CO2 equivalence ( CO2 eq): a method of measuring greenhouse gas emissions that takes into account the warming power of each gas relative to that of CO2 ; Mt CO2 eq: million tons of CO2 equivalent; Gt CO2 eq: billion tons of CO2 equivalent.

Renewable energies (RE): these are energies derived from natural processes that are constantly being renewed. Purely electrical renewable energies include hydro, wind, tidal and photovoltaic solar energy. Thermal renewables include firewood, incinerated wood and crop residues, incinerated urban and industrial waste of biological origin, biogas, biofuels, solar thermal energy, geothermal energy in the form of heat or electricity and heat pumps.

ETS: Emissions Trading System. CO2 Emission Trading Scheme (ETS).

GHGs: greenhouse gases, gaseous constituents of the atmosphere, both natural and anthropogenic, which absorb and re-emit infrared radiation.

IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, responsible for organizing the synthesis of scientific work on climate change.

Inventory: the greenhouse gas inventory of a given territory is a table by major sector that presents the emissions in a simple form that can be used by anyone who wants an objective overview. The inventories are carried out by applying the methodological principles defined by the IPCC. The inventories are published on the UNFCCC website.

CBAM: Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This instrument is proposed by the European Commission as part of the "Fit for 55" legislative package and its objective is to prevent carbon leakage.

Primary energy mix: for a given geographical area, the distribution of consumption of the different energy sources before their transformation to be made available to users.

NDC: Nationally Determined Contributions. NDCs describe national efforts to combat climate change in the form of mitigation and/or adaptation targets. NDCs are said to be conditional when they are subject to certain factors, such as the ability of national legislatures to enact the necessary laws or the possibility of international support.

AnnexI and AnnexBcountries: Annex I countries of the UNFCCC are composed of developed countries and countries in transition to a market economy. They include the EU, the USA, Canada, Australia and Russia, but not China and India. With a few exceptions, these countries correspond to the countries in Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol, which sets out the quantified commitments with which they must comply.

GDP: gross domestic product. A measure of the wealth created by a country over a period of time. Its measurement in purchasing power parity (PPP) allows comparisons between countries.

GWP: Global Warming Potential. It allows, over a given period of time, to compare the contributions of different greenhouse gases to global warming. It should be noted that the 100-year GWPs of the various GHGs have varied over the course of the IPCC reports. This is normal, because GWPs, which reflect effects compared to that of CO2, are indeed dependent on:

• concentrations of various greenhouse gases already present in the atmosphere;
• the natural cycles of the gases considered, which condition their rate of purification of the atmosphere, and thus their "life span" in the air.

The GWPs used in Parts 2,3, and 4 to switch to CO2eqfrom CO2, CH4, and N2O data are based on the 100-year GWPs from the IPCC AR4.

Industrial processes: category that includes greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes associated with chemical or physical transformations other than the combustion of energy, such as decarbonation during cement production.

Emission allowance: unit of account of the carbon market system. Represents one ton of CO2 .

Market Stability Reserve: a mechanism put in place in 2015 and operational in 2019 to regulate the surplus of allowances in circulation on the EU ETS market by decreasing or increasing the number of auctions, depending on the thresholds of allowances in circulation.

Fossil reserves: quantities of oil, gas and coal that can be recovered from deposits that have already been discovered, based on current economic and technical constraints.

Baseline 2007scenario : this scenario, prepared for the European Commission by the E3M laboratory of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens, presents projections for the EU energy system to 2030. It takes into account the policies implemented in the Member States until the end of 2006.

International routes: emissions related to international air and sea transport.

toe: tonne of oil equivalent. Unit of measurement of energy.

LULUCF: Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry.