Abstract
Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical ...review, we synthesise the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimates of GHG emissions trends by sector from 1990 to 2018, describing the major sources of emissions growth, stability and decline across ten global regions. Overall, the literature and data emphasise that progress towards reducing GHG emissions has been limited. The prominent global pattern is a continuation of underlying drivers with few signs of emerging limits to demand, nor of a deep shift towards the delivery of low and zero carbon services across sectors. We observe a moderate decarbonisation of energy systems in Europe and North America, driven by fuel switching and the increasing penetration of renewables. By contrast, in rapidly industrialising regions, fossil-based energy systems have continuously expanded, only very recently slowing down in their growth. Strong demand for materials, floor area, energy services and travel have driven emissions growth in the industry, buildings and transport sectors, particularly in Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and South-East Asia. An expansion of agriculture into carbon-dense tropical forest areas has driven recent increases in AFOLU emissions in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. Identifying, understanding, and tackling the most persistent and climate-damaging trends across sectors is a fundamental concern for research and policy as humanity treads deeper into the Anthropocene.
Emissions into the atmosphere from human activities show marked temporal variations, from inter-annual to hourly levels. The consolidated practice of calculating yearly emissions follows the same ...temporal allocation of the underlying annual statistics. However, yearly emissions might not reflect heavy pollution episodes, seasonal trends, or any time-dependant atmospheric process. This study develops high-time resolution profiles for air pollutants and greenhouse gases co- emitted by anthropogenic sources in support of atmospheric modelling, Earth observation communities and decision makers. The key novelties of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) temporal profiles are the development of (i) country/region- and sector- specific yearly profiles for all sources, (ii) time dependent yearly profiles for sources with inter-annual variability of their seasonal pattern, (iii) country- specific weekly and daily profiles to represent hourly emissions, (iv) a flexible system to compute hourly emissions including input from different users. This work creates a harmonized emission temporal distribution to be applied to any emission database as input for atmospheric models, thus promoting homogeneity in inter-comparison exercises.
Non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) include a large number of chemical species which differ significantly in their chemical characteristics and thus in their impacts on ozone and ...secondary organic aerosol formation. It is important that chemical transport models (CTMs) simulate the chemical transformation of the different NMVOC species in the troposphere consistently. In most emission inventories, however, only total NMVOC emissions are reported, which need to be decomposed into classes to fit the requirements of CTMs. For instance, the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) provides spatially resolved global anthropogenic emissions of total NMVOCs. In this study the EDGAR NMVOC inventory was revised and extended in time and in sectors. Moreover the new version of NMVOC emission data in the EDGAR database were disaggregated on a detailed sector resolution to individual species or species groups, thus enhancing the usability of the NMVOC emission data by the modelling community. Region- and source-specific speciation profiles of NMVOC species or species groups are compiled and mapped to EDGAR processes (detailed resolution of sectors), with corresponding quality codes specifying the quality of the mapping. Individual NMVOC species in different profiles are aggregated to 25 species groups, in line with the common classification of the Global Emissions Initiative (GEIA). Global annual grid maps with a resolution of 0.1° × 0.1° for the period 1970–2012 are produced by sector and species. Furthermore, trends in NMVOC composition are analysed, taking road transport and residential sources in Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) as examples.
Global anthropogenic emission inventories remain vital
for understanding the sources of atmospheric pollution and the associated impacts on the environment, human health, and society.
Rapid changes ...in today's society require that these inventories provide
contemporary estimates of multiple atmospheric pollutants with both source
sector and fuel type information to understand and effectively mitigate
future impacts. To fill this need, we have updated the open-source Community
Emissions Data System (CEDS) (Hoesly et al., 2019) to
develop a new global emission inventory, CEDSGBD-MAPS. This inventory
includes emissions of seven key atmospheric pollutants (NOx; CO;
SO2; NH3; non-methane volatile organic compounds, NMVOCs; black carbon, BC; organic carbon, OC) over the time period from 1970–2017
and reports annual country-total emissions as a function of 11 anthropogenic
sectors (agriculture; energy generation; industrial processes;
on-road and non-road transportation; separate residential, commercial, and other
sectors (RCO); waste; solvent use; and international shipping) and four fuel
categories (total coal, solid biofuel, the sum of liquid-fuel and
natural-gas combustion, and remaining process-level emissions). The
CEDSGBD-MAPS inventory additionally includes monthly global gridded
(0.5∘ × 0.5∘) emission fluxes for each compound, sector, and fuel type to facilitate their
use in earth system models. CEDSGBD-MAPS utilizes updated activity
data, updates to the core CEDS default scaling procedure, and modifications
to the final procedures for emissions gridding and aggregation. Relative to the previous CEDS inventory (Hoesly et
al., 2018), these updates extend the emission estimates from 2014 to 2017
and improve the overall agreement between CEDS and two widely used global
bottom-up emission inventories. The CEDSGBD-MAPS inventory provides the
most contemporary global emission estimates to date for these key
atmospheric pollutants and is the first to provide global estimates for
these species as a function of multiple fuel types and source
sectors. Dominant sources of global NOx and SO2 emissions in 2017
include the combustion of oil, gas, and coal in the energy and industry
sectors as well as on-road transportation and international shipping for
NOx. Dominant sources of global CO emissions in 2017 include on-road
transportation and residential biofuel combustion. Dominant global sources
of carbonaceous aerosol in 2017 include residential biofuel combustion,
on-road transportation (BC only), and emissions from the waste
sector. Global emissions of NOx, SO2, CO, BC, and OC all peak in
2012 or earlier, with more recent emission reductions driven by large
changes in emissions from China, North America, and Europe. In contrast,
global emissions of NH3 and NMVOCs continuously increase between 1970
and 2017, with agriculture as a major source of global NH3
emissions and solvent use, energy, residential, and the on-road transport
sectors as major sources of global NMVOCs. Due to similar development
methods and underlying datasets, the CEDSGBD-MAPS emissions are
expected to have consistent sources of uncertainty as other bottom-up
inventories. The CEDSGBD-MAPS source
code is publicly available online through GitHub:
https://github.com/emcduffie/CEDS/tree/CEDS_GBD-MAPS (last access: 1 December 2020). The
CEDSGBD-MAPS emission inventory dataset (both annual country-total and
monthly global gridded files) is publicly available under https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754964
(McDuffie et al., 2020c).
•The EDGAR dataset provides decades-long time series of GHG emissions for all world countries.•The EDGAR V5.0 updates CO2 emissions data to 2018 and non-CO2 to 2015.•EDGAR shows an overall upward ...trend for global GHG emissions.•A detailed overview of emission trends and features is provided by gas, by activity sector and by geographical areas.
Over the last three decades, socio-economic, demographic and technological transitions have been witnessed throughout the world, modifying both sectorial and geographical distributions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Understanding these trends is central to the design of current and future climate change mitigation policies, requiring up-to-date methodologically robust emission inventories such as the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), the European Commission’s in-house, independent global emission inventory. EDGAR is a key tool to track the evolution of GHG emissions and contributes to quantifying the global carbon budget, providing independent and systematically calculated emissions for all countries.
According to the results of the EDGAR v.5.0 release, total anthropogenic global greenhouse gas emissions (excluding land use, land use change and forestry) were estimated at 49.1 Gt CO2eq in 2015, 50 % higher than in 1990, despite a monotonic decrease in GHG emissions per unit of economic output. Between 1990 and 2015, emissions from developed countries fell by 9%, while emissions from low to medium income countries increased by 130%, predominantly from 2000 onwards. The 27 Member States of the European Union and the United Kingdom led the pathway for emission reductions in industrialised economies whilst, in developing countries, the rise in emissions was driven by higher emissions in China, India, Brazil and nations in the South-East Asian region. This diversity of patterns shows how different patterns for GHG emissions are and the need for identifying regionally tailored emission reduction measures.
Spatially distributed anthropogenic and open burning emissions are
fundamental data needed by Earth system models. We describe the methods used
for generating gridded datasets produced for use by the ...modeling
community, particularly for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase
6. The development of three sets of gridded data for historical open
burning, historical anthropogenic, and future scenarios was coordinated to
produce consistent data over 1750–2100. Historical data up to 2014 were
provided with annual resolution and future scenario data in 10-year
intervals. Emissions are provided on a sectoral basis, along with additional
files for speciated non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs). An
automated framework was developed to produce these datasets to ensure that
they are reproducible and facilitate future improvements. We discuss the
methodologies used to produce these data along with limitations and
potential for future work.
Abstract
Between 1970 and 2015 urban population almost doubled worldwide with the fastest growth taking place in developing regions. To aid the understanding of how urbanisation has influenced ...anthropogenic CO
2
and air pollutant emissions across all world regions, we make use of the latest developments of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. In this study, we systematically analyse over 5 decades of emissions from different types of human settlements (from urban centres to rural areas) for different sectors in all countries. Our analysis shows that by 2015, urban centres were the source of a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gases and most of the air pollutant emissions. The high levels of both population and emissions in urban centres therefore call for focused urban mitigation efforts. Moreover, despite the overall increase in urban emissions, megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants in high-income countries have been reducing their emissions, while emissions in developing regions are still growing. We further discuss per capita emissions to compare different types of urban centres at the global level.
We interpret in situ and satellite observations with a chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem, downscaled to 0.1° × 0.1°) to understand global trends in population-weighted mean chemical composition of ...fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Trends in observed and simulated population-weighted mean PM2.5 composition over 1989–2013 are highly consistent for PM2.5 (−2.4 vs −2.4%/yr), secondary inorganic aerosols (−4.3 vs −4.1%/yr), organic aerosols (OA, −3.6 vs −3.0%/yr) and black carbon (−4.3 vs −3.9%/yr) over North America, as well as for sulfate (−4.7 vs −5.8%/yr) over Europe. Simulated trends over 1998–2013 also have overlapping 95% confidence intervals with satellite-derived trends in population-weighted mean PM2.5 for 20 of 21 global regions. Over 1989–2013, most (79%) of the simulated increase in global population-weighted mean PM2.5 of 0.28 μg m–3yr–1 is explained by significantly (p < 0.05) increasing OA (0.10 μg m–3yr–1), nitrate (0.05 μg m–3yr–1), sulfate (0.04 μg m–3yr–1), and ammonium (0.03 μg m–3yr–1). These four components predominantly drive trends in population-weighted mean PM2.5 over populous regions of South Asia (0.94 μg m–3yr–1), East Asia (0.66 μg m–3yr–1), Western Europe (−0.47 μg m–3yr–1), and North America (−0.32 μg m–3yr–1). Trends in area-weighted mean and population-weighted mean PM2.5 composition differ significantly.
Greenhouse gases (GHG) and air pollutants (AP) share several anthropic sources but evolve differently in time across the various regions of the globe. Fossil and biological fuel combustion is by far ...the single process producing the highest amounts of both types of compounds. We have analyzed the paces of change of both GHG and AP emissions across the world and in some selected highly emitting regions using purposely designed indicators.
We have observed that, overall, combustion processes are generally producing a lower amount of pollutants per unit of GHG emitted in 2018 than in 1970, with the noticeable exception of ammonia emissions in transport. Nevertheless, comparing countries at different development levels, evidence of possible further improvement clearly emerges, depending on the technological evolution of the most important emitting sectors and on the implementation of appropriate control measures and policies.
Display omitted
•We compared the combustion related greenhouse gases and air pollutants emissions•Air pollutants per unit of greenhouse gases show a generally decreasing trend•Exceptions exist, which will deserve further investigation•Comparing across stages of development, room for improvement clearly emerges
Environmental science; Environmental policy; Energy policy
PDF
