Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. I'm going to share my time with my colleague, Mr. Mr. Mr. Derek Hermanutz, from the Department of the Environment. We're primarily here today to speak to you about our use of energy data. We are consumers of that data, so we'll be speaking from that perspective.
Every year, Environment and Climate Change Canada obtains statistics on fuel consumption from our colleagues at Statistics Canada. These statistics are a critical input to our annual key deliverables, namely, the national inventories of sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, and of the emissions of air pollutants, and black carbon.
The inventories that we produce fulfill a number of domestic and international functions, such as meeting the international reporting requirements and setting the official benchmark for actual emissions in Canada since 1990.
The national greenhouse gas inventory is perhaps our most visible product. It's updated every year and published on an annual basis, and the most recent one was put out only about 10 days ago. It's published every April. Based on the latest published data, anyone reading the report will see that fuel use in Canada represents approximately 80% of total greenhouse gas emissions. This means that over three-quarters of the greenhouse gas emissions cited in Canada are based on the fuel statistics that we receive from our colleagues at Statistics Canada.
There's been a long-standing and well-established process through which our two departments closely collaborate on the quality control of these fuel statistics and how we use them. Certainly the provincial and territorial stakeholders scrutinize the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to their respective jurisdictions and will alert us when they identify any inconsistencies or unexpected emission data. In turn, we work directly with those jurisdictions and with our colleagues at Statistics Canada to resolve those issues.
Fuel statistics provide the solid basis for our GHG inventory. While it's a well-established process, there are, of course, continuing improvements that need to be made and that we continue to work on. For example, reducing the variation in the quality of the data between jurisdictions is an important issue for us as we produce national inventories. Certainly emerging issues like biofuels are an area that we continue to need to improve the statistics on, and, of course, minimizing any revisions from year to year because we are collecting data on a long trend line, and that information is updated on a yearly basis. We do sometimes pick up issues that affect the longer trends of previous years. That's why revisions and minimizing those disturbances across the trend line are very important.
Environment Canada also recently launched an expansion to its own greenhouse gas reporting program, which collects greenhouse gas emission data from facilities directly, across Canada. That expansion will allow it to feed facility data directly into our greenhouse gas inventory. While there is currently very limited duplication between what Statistics Canada collects and what we will start collecting, we will obviously work together very closely to ensure that there is a minimum of duplication in terms of data collection for those purposes.
I'm going to pass it over to my colleague, Derek, who will also talk about the products that he's involved with.