Abstract
Estimates of Asian emissions of air pollutants and carbonaceous aerosols and their mid-term projections have been changing significantly in the last years. The remote sensing community has shown that increase in NOx in Central East Asia is much stronger than any of the emission inventories or projections indicated so far. A number of studies reviewing older estimates appeared. Here, we review the key contributions and compare them to the most recent results of the GAINS model application for Asia and to the SRES projections used in the IPPC work. The recent projections indicate that the growth of emissions of SO2 in Asia should slow down significantly towards 2010 or even stabilize at the current level. For NOx, however, further growth is projected although it will be most likely slower that in the last decade, owing to introduction of measures in transport. Emissions of carbonaceous aerosols (black carbon and organic carbon) are expected to decline after 2010, largely due to reduced use of biofuels in residential sector and efficiency improvements. The estimates of these emissions are burdened with significantly larger uncertainties than SO2 and NOx; even for the year 2000 the differences in estimates between studies are up to a factor of 2.
Highlights
Asian emissions of air pollutants have been growing at an unprecedented rate over the last decade
The relevant documentation for the pollutants included in this paper, that is, for SO 2 (Cofala and Syri, 1998a), Nitrogen oxides (NO x) (Cofala and Syri, 1998b) and carbonaceous aerosols (Kupiainen and Klimont, 2004, 2007) can be downloaded from the model site
Recent remote sensing results (Richter et al, 2005, 2007) show a high increase in pollution levels over Asian continent in the last years, especially in East Asia. These increases are often larger than those estimated in emission inventories and models (Ma et al, 2006; He et al, 2007; Zhang et al, 2007)
Summary
Asian emissions of air pollutants have been growing at an unprecedented rate over the last decade. This is directly linked to the continuing strong economic growth The pace of change from mid 1990s until now has been hotly debated in several papers, especially for China where the decline in coal consumption reported in statistics in the end of the last century does not correspond to the continuing economic growth (Streets and Aunan, 2005; Akimoto et al, 2006). Asia in the last decade (Richter et al, 2005) than previously shown in emission inventory work and models (He et al, 2007; Zhang et al, 2007). High growth has been estimated recently for emissions of SO 2 in Asia (Richter et al, 2007)
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