Abstract
The fishing industry is heavily reliant on the use of fossil fuel and emits large quantities of greenhouse gases and other atmospheric pollutants. Methods used to calculate fishing vessel emissions inventories have traditionally utilised estimates of fuel efficiency per unit of catch. These methods have weaknesses because they do not easily allow temporal and geographical allocation of emissions. A large proportion of fishing and other small commercial vessels are also omitted from global shipping emissions inventories such as the International Maritime Organisation's Greenhouse Gas Studies. This paper demonstrates an activity-based methodology for the production of temporally- and spatially-resolved emissions inventories using data produced by Automatic Identification Systems (AIS). The methodology addresses the issue of how to use AIS data for fleets where not all vessels use AIS technology and how to assign engine load when vessels are towing trawling or dredging gear. The results of this are compared to a fuel-based methodology using publicly available European Commission fisheries data on fuel efficiency and annual catch. The results show relatively good agreement between the two methodologies, with an estimate of 295.7 kilotons of fuel used and 914.4 kilotons of carbon dioxide emitted between May 2012 and May 2013 using the activity-based methodology. Different methods of calculating speed using AIS data are also compared. The results indicate that using the speed data contained directly in the AIS data is preferable to calculating speed from the distance and time interval between consecutive AIS data points.
Highlights
Throughout the 20th century fisheries became highly dependent on fossil fuels (Tyedmers et al, 2005), and are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and other atmospheric pollutants (Driscoll and Tyedmers, 2010)
Complete emissions inventories of fishing fleets continue to rely on fuel-based methods, possibly due to issues associated with modelling fuel consumption of vessels engaged in trawling and dredging activities and because only a subset of fishing vessels currently broadcast Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) data
The split between main and auxiliary engines differs by speed calculation method with 7.3% of fuel used in auxiliary engines, where speed is calculated from distance and time, but 14.0% of fuel used in auxiliary engines when taking speeds from the AIS data (Table 5)
Summary
Throughout the 20th century fisheries became highly dependent on fossil fuels (Tyedmers et al, 2005), and are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and other atmospheric pollutants (Driscoll and Tyedmers, 2010). J. Coello et al / Atmospheric Environment 114 (2015) 1e7 more accurate and useful than fuel-based methods for the calculation of shipping emissions inventories (Buhaug et al, 2009; Smith et al, 2014). Approaches using activity data derived from the messages broadcast by vessel's Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) have emerged as the state-of-the-art in recent years, offering the opportunity to produce accurate, vessel-specific spatially and temporally resolved emissions inventories (Jalkanen et al, 2009; MARIN, 2012; Olesen et al, 2009; Perez et al, 2009; Smith et al, 2014). Complete emissions inventories of fishing fleets continue to rely on fuel-based methods, possibly due to issues associated with modelling fuel consumption of vessels engaged in trawling and dredging activities and because only a subset of fishing vessels currently broadcast AIS data
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