INMS Guidance Document on National Nitrogen Budgets

National nitrogen budgets are tools to compile and evaluate data on the use of nitrogen compounds, their environmental fate and potential impacts. Such budgets provide input necessary to derive valuable indicators such as nitrogen use efficiency, nitrogen surplus/deficit or nitrogen recycling rate. They help identify key flows and intervention points and allow decision-making by governments and agencies to tackle the nitrogen cascade. This INMS Guidance Document discusses, with country examples, the concepts and foundations of nitrogen budgets using the CHANS (Coupled Human and Natural Systems) model originally developed for China and the EPNB (UNECE Expert Panel on Nitrogen Budgets) approach created on the basis of statistics available within the European Union. The Guidance Document is aimed at governments, agencies and researchers who can all benefit from the concepts and approaches as they look to establish nitrogen budgets for other parts of the world. With environmental losses representing a waste of nitrogen resources currently worth hundreds of billion USD annually, nitrogen budgets provide a key tool to inform mitigation strategies that benefit the economy and protect the environment at the same time.