EPNB - Expert Panel on Nitrogen Budgets

The Expert Panel on Nitrogen Budgets (EPNB) provides expert guidance to the Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen in providing mass-consistent information of the fate of nitrogen in the environment. It was initiated at the first meeting of the Task Force in Wageningen, Netherlands, in June 2008 as an ad-hoc expert panel. Between 2008 and 2022, 19 meetings of the EPNB have been organized, many of which coincided with regular task force meetings. The most recent meeting of the EPNB was organized May 3 in Dessau, Germany, jointly with the Task Force on Reactive Nitrogen, May 2-4, 2023. Please see the agenda at the bottom of ths page, the minutes are available here. For access to the presentation slides please see the notes provided in the minutes.

EPNB prepared the “Guidance Document on National Nitrogen Budgets”. The document was presented and approved at the 31st meeting of the Executive Body of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. The document can be downloaded from here. There is also a French and a Russian version available.

The detailed provisions of creating N budgets for seven out of eight pools defined in the GD (and a general overview on definitions and principles) have now been provided by EPNB. These Annexes to the GD are now available for public review. Please download and use the annexes provided as one file here (~7 MB file size). This file version includes all comments received by September 21, 2016, and now also includes the Energy Annex that has been made available in September 2019. A first draft concept has been prepared also for the remaining pool, the „Waste Annex“ that can be made available. Please contact one of the EPNB co-chairs in case you wish to seriously engage in working on this pool.

User feedback has been received and updated (July 2, 2023), and any user is advised to consider when taking advantage of guidance. Please download this document.  General information on challenges related to the use of this guidance has been provided here. Additional feedback especially on topics that appear during use of these documents will continue to be highly valued even after full adoption. Please download and fill in the review sheet for your feedback, and send it by e-mail to the EPNB co-chairs (Wilfried Winiwarter, winiwarter(at)iiasa.ac.at, and Markus Geupel, markus.geupel(at)uba.de). With the upcoming inclusion of the Waste Annex and a general harmonization, a complete version will be issued.

We will continue posting constructive suggestions along with the guiding material, before improvements are taken up by EPNB and integrated in updated Annexes.

 

 

Agenda EPNB-20 (May 3, 2023 - Dessau, Germany):

block 1 (9.00-11.00)

  •   welcome and introduction (Wilfried and Markus)
  •   registered national contributions  
    •   Austria (I. Djukic)
  •   Tour de table (informal, including news from individual countries)
  •   information from related projects and activities  
    • INMAP (Markus on behalf of Bruna Grizzetti)
    • INMS guidance document on NNBs (Wilfried also on behalf of Kentaro Hayashi)
    • Progress on NNBs in Japan (to be presented by Wilfried):
      • Integrated nitrogen management for national nitrogen waste reduction (Kazuya Nishina)
      • Sustai-N-able (Kentaro Hayashi)  
    • marine systems – maximal allowable inputs and implementation in the EMERGE project (Wilfried)

block 2 (11.30 – 13.00)

  • UBA Project for Review and revision of Guidance Document, Annex “Waste” and reporting template (M. Geupel)
  • Visualization tool (A. Vigier (online)), also in relation with reporting
  • General discussion

block 3 (14.00 – 15.00)

  • Workplan discussion and Call for data
  • Application of NNBs  

 

EPNB sends updates on their activities in an e-mail newsletter, in addition to material posted here (see EPNB Newsletter April '21). If you wish to become involved, please contact the co-chairs via e-mail. Information on past and current activities, e.g. the minutes of all previous EPNB meetings are also available from this site.