Insights into the spatial distribution of global, national, and subnational greenhouse gas emissions in the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR v8.0)

Knowing where emissions occur is essential for planning effective emission reduction measures and for atmospheric modelling. Emission inventories are typically compiled at national level and provide sector-specific emission estimates. Disaggregating national emissions on high-resolution grids requires spatial proxies that contain information on the location of different emission sources (e.g. point sources, linear and area sources). Knowing the correct allocation of emissions from point sources is essential to avoid the misallocating high emission levels. However, gathering information on point sources covering the entire globe and a wide temporal domain (1970 to present) is challenging due to limited data availability, accuracy of the reporting and completeness of data. The latest spatial proxies developed as part of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv8.0) provide the user with the possibility to work with different geographical details using a consistently developed GHG emissions database. A key novelty of EDGARv8.0 is the possibility to analyse sub-national GHG emissions over the European domain, but also over the US, China, India and main world countries. The relevance of using updated spatial information is assessed on the basis of regional case studies. The data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.2905/b54d8149-2864-4fb9-96b9-5fd3a020c224 specific for EDGARv8.0 (Crippa, 2023a) and doi:10.2905/D67EEDA8-C03E-4421-95D0-0ADC460B9658 for the sub- national dataset (Crippa et al., 2023b).