Highlight of the month

Greenhouse gases distribution & sources: EDGAR emissions in Google Earth

Discover the situation in your area!

The JRC's IES has developed a high resolution digital view of manmade greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for any 10 x 10 km area in the world.

Using this work on emissions and Google Earth as a basis, the new tool allows the visualisation of the levels of emissions and their local distribution from 1970 to 2005 and the identification of the main sources through an add-on layer to Google Earth.
The grid size is a tenth of a geographical degree of latitude by the same extension in longitude, or simplified, a circa 10 km x 10 km square, roughly the size of central Paris.

Data used in the display come from the JRC and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency's (PBL) Emission Database for Global Research (EDGAR). Emissions by country and sector are taken from its EDGAR v4.0, which uses the latest scientific information and data from international statistics on energy production and consumption, industrial manufacturing, agricultural production, waste treatment, and disposal and burning of biomass.
This application brings environmental information closer to the world's citizens. By simply typing a city name, the amount of greenhouse gases released in that city since 1970 can be displayed.
By zooming in on this global GHG emission map, one can literally go from global to local scale.
In addition, the main sources of GHG emissions in 2005 can be traced. these include industries (fuel combustion, process and waste emissions in energy and manufacturing industries); transport (road, rail, shipping, aviation); residential fuel combustion and waste handling; and agriculture.

On a large scale, the display shows how emissions are unevenly distributed over the globe, even within countries (figure 1) and the different evolution of emissions in the world over time: A history of 35 years (1970-2005) of emissions by area and sector, covering not only carbon dioxide (CO2) but also GHGs such as methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).
For comparison purposes, the individual gases have been converted into CO2-equivalents.
This temporal overview allows for instance to check how emissions have been growing lately in India and China.

Figure 1

Moreover, the application highlights that in some countries the combination of high density population and large industries results in more than 250 ktonne per year and area cell (e.g. in the Netherlands, Japan or Singapore) while in large parts of the globe, the overall man-made GHG emissions per 10x10 km are less than 1 ktonne of CO2 equivalents.

The application will be presented during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, on the 17th of December at 13:00 in Room Monnet.

EDGAR GHG viewer 2005: Download here

EDGAR GHG viewer 1970-2005: Download here
The movie-like display sequence shows the annual total emissions in the period 1970-2005 for all sectors, excluding aviation, land use change and forestry. The zoom to city level is not supported.

IMPORTANT! You need to have Google Earth installed on your computer to run these applications. Then just download the files above and click on their icons to start

Disclaimer
Reproduction of the data is authorised, except for commercial purposes, provided the source is fully acknowledged in the form "Source: European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)/Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), release version 4.0. http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu , 2009".