Evaluation of anthropogenic air pollutant emission inventories for South America at national and city scale

Abstract

The changing composition of the atmosphere, driven by anthropogenic emissions, is the cause of anthropogenic climate change as well as deteriorating air quality. Emission inventories are essential to understand the contribution of various human activities, model and predict the changing atmospheric composition, and design cost-effective mitigation measures. At present, national emission inventories in South America (SA) focus on Greenhouse Gases (GHG) as part of their obligations to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCC) within the framework of their national communications. Emission inventories other than for GHG in SA focus mainly on growing urban areas and megacities. Therefore, studies examining air quality at national, regional or continental scales in SA depend on (down-scaled) global emission inventories. This paper examines the emission estimates of air pollutants from various global inventories for five SA countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. A more detailed analysis is conducted for the EDGAR and ECLIPSE emission inventories, in particular against local city-scale inventories of a major city in each country. Although total emissions between down-scaled global inventories and local city inventories are often comparable, large discrepancies exist between the sectoral contributions. This is critical as the mitigation of poor air quality will depend on addressing the right sources. Potential sources of discrepancies between global and local inventories include the spatial distribution proxies, difference in emission factors used and/or the use of generic statistical country data when estimating emissions. This highlights the importance of using local information when generating national emission inventories, especially for air quality modeling and development of effective mitigation measures. This work represents a first step towards an increased understanding of the strength and weaknesses of emissions information in SA.

Air pollution and COVID-19 lockdown in a large South American city: Santiago Metropolitan Area, Chile

“…CO 2 emissions were converted into fuel consumption to compare with the official transport-related fuel sales in the SMA, for validation. Other authors have used these on-road transport emissions as input for air quality modelling analysis in Santiago ( Huneeus et al, 2020a ; Mazzeo et al, 2018 ).…”

Increasing trends (2001–2018) in photochemical activity and secondary aerosols in Santiago, Chile

“…Furthermore, modelling the impact assessment of upwind emissions to air quality in the Santiago basin is somehow limited by the fact that Chile does not have a nation-wide, consistent inventory for air quality purposes, which has implied considering either only specific pollutants and sources (Gallardo et al, 2002;Olivares et al, 2002) or a combination of local (city-scale) and global inventories (Mazzeo et al, 2018). Downscaling of global inventories that use generic national statistics mis-represents the relative role of different sources and is not recommended for air quality studies (Huneeus et al, 2020). Also, if local inventories are built using different methodologies and data sources, they may be inconsistent when combined to cover a larger area (Gallardo et al, 2012).…”

Review of essd-2020-103 “A global anthropogenic emission inventory of atmospheric pollutants from sector- and fuel-specific sources (1970–2017)

“…Additional suggestions for final discussion: Recently Huneeus et al (2020) published an evaluation of emission inventories for South America which included EDGSAR, ECLIPSE and CEDS. It would be interesting to comment on how the new inventory presented here would have an impact on SA estimates and compares to the CEDS version used in that paper?…”