Abstract
Emissions of gases and particles from the combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels in Africa are expected to increase significantly in the near future due to the rapid growth of African cities and megacities. There is currently no regional emissions inventory that provides estimates of anthropogenic combustion for the African continent. This work provides a quantification of the evolution of African combustion emissions from 2005 to 2030, using a bottom-up method. This inventory predicts very large increases in black carbon, organic carbon, CO, NOx, SO2 and non-methane hydrocarbon emissions if no emission regulations are implemented. This paper discusses the effectiveness of scenarios involving certain fuels, specific to Africa in each activity sector and each region (western, eastern, northern and southern Africa), to reduce the emissions. The estimated trends in African emissions are consistent with emissions provided by global inventories, but they display a larger range of values. African combustion emissions contributed significantly to global emissions in 2005. This contribution will increase more significantly by 2030: organic carbon emissions will for example make up 50% of the global emissions in 2030. Furthermore, we show that the magnitude of African anthropogenic emissions could be similar to African biomass burning emissions around 2030.
Highlights
Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of emissions from biomass burning on the atmospheric composition in Africa
The consumption data for the three inventories (REF, constraint case’ scenario (CCC) and CCC*) for the year 2030 were derived from the 2005 African data described in section 1.1.1 and from the ratios between 2030 and 2002 fuel consumption data for the different sectors given by the POLES model
Our study demonstrates the importance of a good knowledge of the emission factors (EFs): there is an urgent need for accurate measurements of the EFs in each country, for biofuel emissions, since only a few measurements are available for Africa
Summary
Global inventories have been published so far, and these have been used for air quality and climate change modeling in Africa (Bond et al 2004, Streets et al 2004, Junker and Liousse 2008, Klimont et al 2009, Lamarque et al 2010, Granier et al 2011, Smith et al 2011, Klimont et al 2013). These works used detailed emissions available at the regional scale for North America, Europe and Asia, but not for Africa, for which there is a general lack of detailed anthropogenic inventories at the continental and regional scales.
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