A Comprehensive Comparison of Nine Fossil-fuel CO2 Emission Estimates for China - Reconciling Diverse Chinese CO2 Emission Estimates
Abstract
China's fossil-fuel CO2 emissions (FFCO2) account for 28% of the global total in 2016. An accurate estimation of FFCO2 from China is of great importance for quantification of global and regional carbon budget (e.g. atmospheric inversions) as well as monitoring of carbon emission reduction efforts towards the Paris Climate goals.
We collected 9 published global and regional emission inventories including 6 gridded emission products, namely, the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC), the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), Peking University-CO2 (PKU), the China High Resolution Emission Database (CHRED), the Multi-resolution Emission Inventory for China (MEIC) and Nanjing University-CO2 (NJU) and 3 country-level emission estimates, namely, the Global Carbon Project (GCP)/the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), the China Emission Accounts and Datasets (CEADs) and the National Communication on Climate Change of China (NCCC). We assessed and compared them in a systematic manner in order to characterize the differences among emission estimates and identify the root causes. These datasets show that the total emission increased from 3.4 (3.0-3.7) in 2000 to 9.8 (9.2-10.4) Gt CO2 yr-1 in 2016. The variations in their estimates were due largely to the different coal emission factors (0.491-0.746) and activity data (e.g., provincial or national statistical data). The large-scale patterns of gridded emissions showed a reasonable agreement with high emissions concentrated in major city clusters, and the standard deviation mostly ranged 10-40% at provincial level. EDGAR and CHRED tend to distribute emissions to high emission grids than other gridded emission products, and their top 5% emission grids account for 90% of the total emissions, while the same grids only make up 50% - 60% for PKU and NJU. Our findings highlight the significance of using locally-measured EF for the Chinese coals. And to reduce the uncertainty, we call on the enhancement of physical CO2 measurements and use them for data validation. Furthermore, the key input data sharing and finer resolution validations at various levels are highly needed. Based on our findings, we discussed how to improve the emission estimation methodologies towards the successful implementation of UNFCCC.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A42A..07H
- Keywords:
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- 0305 Aerosols and particles;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0322 Constituent sources and sinks;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0368 Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE