Environmental accounts. Air Emission Accounts

The INE publishes today for the first time quarterly estimates of Greenhouse Gas emissions in Spain, including a breakdown of emissions by economic activity and households as end consumers. The period for which information is offered covers all the quarters from the first quarter of 2010.

The main objective of this experimental set of statistics is to complement the information on the annual account of Air Emissions, offering faster and more frequent data that allow GHG emissions to be monitored. This in turn makes it possible to assess the trend of emissions.

It also includes the comparison between GHG emissions and the total of the European Union. Both estimates have an identical methodological basis endorsed by international organisations such as Eurostat, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the International Energy Agency, and the United Nations.

Thus, Spain is the third member state of the European Union to draw up these quarterly accounts, along with the Netherlands and Sweden. Eurostat performs the estimate of the rest of the countries of the European Union that do not produce this statistic.

This information will be included in the Environmental Indicators Panel produced by the INE. This experimental set of statistics began to be published in June of this year and includes 39 indicators such as Climate Change, the Circular Economy, Energy and Biodiversity.

In the second quarter of 2024, GHGs emitted by the Spanish economy fell by 3.7% compared with the first quarter, reaching 69,796.7 thousand tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. The rate in the previous quarter was 0.04%.

In annual terms, in 2023, total GHG emissions reached 287.7 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, 5.5% less than in 2022.

Greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 0.8% in the second quarter. This annual emissions rate was 2.8 points higher than that of Q3 2024 (-3.6%).

The experimental set of statistics presented here are part of a project for a quarterly estimate of GHG emissions for the entire European Union (EU27) that is being carried out by Eurostat, in coordination with international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, the International Energy Association and the United Nations Statistics Division.

In this way, the estimates for the Spanish economy are integrated into the quarterly publication carried out by Eurostat together with those of the rest of the countries of the European Union and which are released four months after the end of the reference quarter.

In the EU27 as a whole, GHG emissions decreased by 11.9% in the second quarter compared to the first. In Spain they fell by 3.7%.

In terms of the annual rate, emissions in the EU27 fell by 2.6% (-0.8% in Spain). As in our country, the activity that most reduced emissions in the EU was Supply of electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning.

The data published today are provisional and will be revised when the next quarter's data is released. All the results of this operation are available at INEbase.