EDUCATION: GLOBAL METHANE INVENTORY

Research Projects

The following are short-term and long-term research projects based on current methane research. The projects range from a few weeks long to a semester long and exercise such skills as data manipulation and analysis, graphing skills, and experiment design.

All of the projects involve using data from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization website. See the appendices listed in the supplementary material below for instructions on how to do so.

Per Capita Methane Emissions: A Fairer Way of Producing Methane Inventories?

This project explores an alternative method of taking account of methane emissions to the one currently in use by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization. The project explores how different methods of presenting the same data can reveal different facts.
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Trends in Landfill Emissions of Methane

Landfill emissions are directly proportional to population especially the urban fraction of the population. This project focuses on changes in the urban/rural make up of the population of specific countries to predict what may happen to landfill emissions in the future.
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Who is Responsible for Methane Emissions?

The Kyoto Protocols call for all countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a specific percentage of their 1990 levels. Should each country responsible for all emissions from methane producing commodities (rice, animals and fossil fuels) that it produces and exports? Should the countries that import these commodities be responsible for some part of the methane emissions? This project explores these questions by comparing production and export of methane producing commodities of a country.
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Supplementary Materials

The following appendices describe in detail the methodologies used to make the calculations required for the research projects. They specify where to obtain the data necessary for the projects and provide the emissions factors, necessary to compute methane emissions.

• Appendix 0: Obtaining Data from the FAO Database
• Appendix I: Default Values for Calculating Methane Emissions from Animals
• Appendix II: Default Values for Calculating Methane Emissions from Rice
• Appendix III: Default Values for Calculating Methane Emissions from Landfills

Also available are descriptions of related research projects previously conducted by ICP-affiliated schools.

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