Abstract:
There are very few African regional inventories providing biofuel and fossil fuel emissions. Within
the framework of the DACCIWA project, we have developed an African regional anthropogenic emission inventory
including the main African polluting sources (wood and charcoal burning, charcoal making, trucks, cars,
buses and two-wheeled vehicles, open waste burning, and flaring). To this end, a database on fuel consumption
and emission factors specific to Africa was established using the most recent measurements. New spatial proxies
(road network, power plant geographical coordinates) were used to convert national emissions into gridded inventories
at a 0.1 0.1 spatial resolution. This inventory includes carbonaceous particles (black and organic carbon)
and gaseous species (CO, NOx , SO2 and NMVOCs) for the period 1990–2015 with a yearly temporal resolution.
We show that all pollutant emissions are globally increasing in Africa during the period 1990–2015 with
a growth rate of 95 %, 86 %, 113 %, 112 %, 97% and 130% for BC, OC, NOx , CO, SO2 and NMVOCs, respectively.
We also show that Western Africa is the highest emitting region of BC, OC, CO and NMVOCs, followed
by Eastern Africa, largely due to domestic fire and traffic activities, while Southern Africa and Northern Africa
are the highest emitting regions of SO2 and NOx due to industrial and power plant sources. Emissions from this
inventory are compared to other regional and global inventories, and the emissions uncertainties are quantified by
a Monte Carlo simulation. Finally, this inventory highlights key pollutant emission sectors in which mitigation
scenarios should focus on. The DACCIWA inventory (https://doi.org/10.25326/56, Keita et al., 2020) including
the annual gridded emission inventory for Africa for the period 1990–2015 is distributed by the Emissions of
atmospheric Compounds and Compilation of Ancillary Data (ECCAD) system (https://eccad.aeris-data.fr/, last
access: 19 July 2021). For review purposes, ECCAD has set up an anonymous repository where subsets of the
DACCIWA data can be accessed directly through https://www7.obs-mip.fr/eccad/essd-surf-emis-dacciwa/ (last
access: 19 July 2021).
