The development of national greenhouse gas inventories (NGI) is a task requiring highly technical precision that the Parties to the Paris Agreement shall undertake biennially starting from 2024. Its multiple benefits include providing the Parties, especially developing countries, with a means to track progress made in implementing and achieving their committed goals for GHG emission control and reduction to mitigate climate impacts. Nevertheless, it is not only important to periodically carry out these inventories, it is also of paramount importance that inventories are developed following high quality and transparency standards to foster mutual trust, and that the associated results are reported, disseminated and understood in a timely manner by the international community.

Accordingly, although the Modalities, procedures and guidelines for the transparency framework (Decision 18/CMA.1) and the Outline of the national inventory document, pursuant to the modalities, procedures and guidelines for the transparency framework (Annex V, Decision 5/CMA.3) provide guidelines that are in theory necessary to report the inventory results to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in practice, the preparation and reporting of inventories would be made easier if the countries have supporting tools to aid this work.

To this end, the Capacity-building Initiative for Transparency and Global Support Programme (CBIT-GSP) makes the CBIT-GSP National Inventory Document Template available as a tool for the climate transparency community. This template compiles experiences, good practices and lessons learned from the preparation and review of reports, for both developing and developed countries, containing inventory results based on the precepts of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.

We hope that this CBIT-GSP National Inventory Document Template will become a useful tool for inventory technical teams in developing countries for the submission of their future biennial transparency reports (BTR) by providing additional support to improve quality, transparency and ambition when reporting their progress and updating their next nationally determined contributions.

We would like to express our profound gratitude to the vast number of experts and countries who used the test versions of this template to prepare their own national inventory documents and who kindly submitted valuable feedback, enabling us to make adjustments to the current version, as presented in this document.