A global anthropogenic emission inventory of atmospheric pollutants from sector- and fuel-specific sources (1970–2017): an application of the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS)

• Main Authors: E. E. McDuffie, S. J. Smith, P. O'Rourke, K. Tibrewal, C. Venkataraman, E. A. Marais, B. Zheng, M. Crippa, M. Brauer, R. V. Martin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020-12-01
• Series: Earth System Science Data
• Online Access: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/3413/2020/essd-12-3413-2020.pdf
• ISSN: 1866-3508; 1866-3516

<p>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, CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span>. This inventory includes emissions of seven key atmospheric pollutants (NO<span class="inline-formula">_<i>x</i></span>; CO; SO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>; NH<span class="inline-formula">₃</span>; 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 CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> inventory additionally includes monthly global gridded (0.5<span class="inline-formula">^∘</span> <span class="inline-formula">×</span> 0.5<span class="inline-formula">^∘</span>) emission fluxes for each compound, sector, and fuel type to facilitate their use in earth system models. CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> 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 CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> inventory provides the most contemporary global emission estimates to date for these<span id="page3414"/> 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 NO<span class="inline-formula">_<i>x</i></span> and SO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> 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 NO<span class="inline-formula">_<i>x</i></span>. 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 NO<span class="inline-formula">_<i>x</i></span>, SO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span>, 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 NH<span class="inline-formula">₃</span> and NMVOCs continuously increase between 1970 and 2017, with agriculture as a major source of global NH<span class="inline-formula">₃</span> 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 CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> emissions are expected to have consistent sources of uncertainty as other bottom-up inventories. The CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> source code is publicly available online through GitHub: <span class="uri">https://github.com/emcduffie/CEDS/tree/CEDS_GBD-MAPS</span> (last access: 1 December 2020). The CEDS<span class="inline-formula">_GBD-MAPS</span> emission inventory dataset (both annual country-total and monthly global gridded files) is publicly available under <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754964">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754964</a> (McDuffie et al., 2020c).</p>