EDGAR v4.3.2 Global Atlas of the three major greenhouse gas emissions for the period 1970–2012

This paper describes EDGAR v4.3.2 developments with respect to three major long-lived GHGs (CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O) derived from a wide range of human activities apart from the land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector and apart from savannah burning; a companion paper quantifies and discusses emissions of air pollutants.

Detailed information is included for each of the IPCC-relevant source sectors, leading to global totals for 2010 (in the middle of the first KP commitment period) (with a 95 % confidence interval in parentheses): 33.6(±5.9) Pg CO₂ yr−1, 0.34(±0.16) Pg CH₄yr−1, and 7.2(±3.7) Tg N₂O yr−1. We provide uncertainty factors in emissions data for the different GHGs and for three different groups of countries: OECD countries of 1990, countries with economies in transition in 1990, and the remaining countries in development (the UNFCCC non-Annex I parties).

We document trends for the major emitting countries together with the European Union in more detail, demonstrating that effects of fuel markets and financial instability have had greater impacts on GHG trends than effects of income or population. These data  are visualised with annual and monthly global emissions grid maps of 0.1^∘×0.1^∘ for each source sector.