Under international clean air agreements, Germany has committed to continuously improve the reporting of its emissions of air pollutants. The current reviews of the national emission inventories under the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the European NEC Directive, have identified areas for improvement in their two revision reports. Further need for improvement results from the internal deficit analyses and quality controls at the Federal Environment Agency.

The project was commissioned by the Federal Environment Agency to create the scientific and methodological basis for further optimising the German emission inventories. For example, it examined how previously unreported pollutants such as black carbon or how certain heavy metals can be integrated into the reporting. IZT's task was to investigate how the information on the uncertainties of reported emissions could be improved. The focus was on improving the determination of uncertainties. For this purpose, the completeness of the information on uncertainties was checked and, according to the relevance of the source groups and the level of their emissions, proposals for improving the uncertainty information were developed with the help of expert interviews and international experience.