Abstract
Abstract. Ship emissions and coastal air pollution around China are expected to be alleviated with the gradual implementation of ship domestic emission control area (DECA) policies. However, a comprehensive post-assessment on the policy's effectiveness is still lacking. This study developed a series of high-spatiotemporal ship emission inventories around China from 2016 to 2019 based on an updated Ship Emission Inventory Model (SEIM v2.0) and analyzed the interannual changes in emissions under the influence of both ship activity increases and gradually promoted policies. In this model, NOx, SO2, PM and HC emissions from ships in China's inland rivers and the 200 Nm (nautical miles) coastal zone were estimated every day with a spatial resolution of 0.05∘×0.05∘ based on a combination of automatic identification system (AIS) data and the Ship Technical Specifications Database (STSD). The route restoration technology and classification of ocean-going vessels (OGVs), coastal vessels (CVs) and river vessels (RVs) has greatly improved our model in the spatial distribution of ship emissions. From 2016 to 2019, SO2 and PM emissions from ships decreased by 29.6 % and 26.4 %, respectively, while ship NOx emissions increased by 13.0 %. Although the DECA 1.0 policy was implemented in 2017, it was not until 2019 when DECA 2.0 came into effect that a significant emission reduction was achieved, e.g., a year-on-year decrease of 33.3 %, regarding SO2. Considering the potential emissions brought by the continuous growth of maritime trade, however, an even larger SO2 emission reduction effect of 39.8 % was achieved in these 4 years compared with the scenario without switching to cleaner fuel. Containers and bulk carriers are still the dominant contributors to ship emissions, and newly built, large ships and ships using clean fuel oil account for an increasingly large proportion of emission structures. A total of 4 years of consecutive daily ship emissions were presented for major ports, which reflects the influence of the step-by-step DECA policy on emissions in a timely manner and may provide useful references for port observation experiments and local policy making. In addition, the spatial distribution shows that a number of ships detoured outside the scope of DECA 2.0 in 2019, perhaps to save costs on more expensive low-sulfur oil, which would increase emissions in farther maritime areas. The multiyear ship emission inventory provides high-quality datasets for air-quality and dispersion modeling, as well as verifications for in situ observation experiments, which may also guide further ship emission control directions in China.
Highlights
Shipping is a significant anthropogenic source of air pollutants and greenhouse gases and has come into the view of scientists and the public since the end of the last century (Corbett and Fischbeck, 1997; Capaldo et al, 1999; Lawrence and Crutzen, 1999)
We developed a series of ship emission inventories (0.05◦ × 0.05◦, daily) for the inland rivers and the 200 nautical miles (Nm) coastal zone of China from 2016 to 2019 based on global automatic identification system (AIS) data and the updated version of the Ship Emission Inventory Model (SEIM v2.0)
As most of the technical methods have been described in our previous work, such as gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) methods, emission calculation algorithms and extra parameter preparations, we focus on the study area definition, the latest data evaluations and the improvements in SEIM v2.0 to introduce the technical details for developing ship emission inventories around China
Summary
Shipping is a significant anthropogenic source of air pollutants and greenhouse gases and has come into the view of scientists and the public since the end of the last century (Corbett and Fischbeck, 1997; Capaldo et al, 1999; Lawrence and Crutzen, 1999). Despite the improvement of global fuel quality and engine posttreatment technology, shipping emissions have continued to increase due to ever-growing mar-. X. Wang et al.: Ship emissions around China itime trade (IMO, 2020; UNCTAD, 2019). Recent studies showed that global shipping emissions constituted 3 % of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in 2017 (IMO, 2020) and much more proportions of reactive gases, e.g., 20 % of NOx and 12 % of SO2 emissions (McDuffie et al, 2020). As the world’s largest maritime trading country and sitting on seven of the world’s top 10 ports with even more densely distributed coastal ports, is meeting an even tougher challenge due to its lagging emission control measurements compared to European and American countries (Mao and Rutherford, 2018b)
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