A host of scientific chemistry and climate model experiments explore responses of the global atmosphere and climate systems to possible future changes in emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases.

MAG has developed a set of global emission fields of nine substances that provide consistent sets of future sectoral emissions for well-specified assumptions on economic development and the effectiveness of dedicated emission control policies. In addition, to facilitate economic assessments of future emission control strategies, estimates of costs of the emission control measures that are assumed in each scenario are available.

This site provides access to gridded global emission fields (0.5*0.5 degree resolution) in the standard netCDF format.

Substances covered

The GAINS model has been used to derive global anthropogenic emissions for the years 2005, 2010, 2030, and 2050, with a 0.5*0.5 degree resolution, for the following pollutants:

sulphur dioxide (SO₂),
nitrogen oxides (NO_x),
non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC),
ammonia (NH₃),
carbon monoxide (CO),
methane (CH₄),
primary fine particulate matter (PM2.5),
black carbon (BC), and
organic carbon (OC)

Assumptions on future activity levels and emission control legislation

The presently available scenarios assume effective implementation of currently agreed national legislation on air pollution controls. Scenarios for alternative assumptions on emission controls are under development.

Emission fields have been developed for exogenous projections of future energy use, transport and industrial production from the following sources:

For the EU-27:

The energy development as outlined by the PRIMES model in the 'Reference' scenario for the '2050 strategy' (as used in the work for the revision of the EU Thematic Strategy for Air Pollution – Amann et al., 2012).
Agricultural activities of the CAPRI baseline scenario developed for the TSAP strategy.

For the rest of the world:

Up to 2030: the energy reference scenario of the World Energy Outlook 2011 of the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2011)
For 2050: the energy baseline scenario developed with the POLES model of the EU Joint Research Center (JRC, Sevilla).
For agriculture, the FAO Outlook (Alexandratos, N. and J. Bruinsma, 2012).
Global emission dataset for international shipping is based on Eyring et al. (2009) and Buhaug et al, (2009), for aviation on Lee et al., (2009) as developed for the work on Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) (van Vuuren et al., 2011).

Biomass burning emissions for other sectors than agricultural waste burning (included in the GAINS calculation) originate from the GFED3.1 global database, including gridded dataset (http://www.globalfiredata.org/Data/index.html).

Sectoral and spatial resolution

Emission estimates are provided for all RCP sectors (energy, industry, solvent use, transport, agriculture, open burning of agricultural waste, residential combustion, and waste treatment) and spatially allocated into 0.5^ox0.5^o longitude-latitude grid cells based on RCP-consistent proxies as used and further developed within Global Energy Assessment project (GEA, 2012).