Global Carbon Grid

About Global Carbon Grid >

The Global Carbon Grid establishes high-resolution maps of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, which aims to provide accurate anthropogenic CO2 emission maps for modeling (forward and inverse), monitoring, and designing mitigation strategies. The Global Carbon Grid is built upon a framework that integrates multiple data flows including point sources, country-level sectoral activities and emissions, and transport emissions and distributions, all of which will be updated regularly on an annual basis to provide the most up-to-date global emission maps.

The Global Carbon Grid v1.0 provides global 0.1°×0.1° CO2 emission maps for six source sectors in 2019, which includes power, industry, residential, transport, shipping, and aviation. Benefiting from the underlying point source datasets (Tong et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2021), more than half of the global CO2 emissions in 2019 are estimated as point sources with accurate geographic coordinates. Another 16% of global CO2 emissions are from road transport, which is distributed onto road atlas (Meijer et al., 2018) using the method developed by Zheng et al. (2014). The global shipping emissions are estimated using the instantaneous engine power of ships based on a combination of the data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and the single-vessel technical specifications (Liu et al., 2016). The global aviation emissions are estimated using the fuel consumption of global aviation and spatially allocated based on the aviation emission maps from EDGAR (Janssens-Maenhout et al., 2019). Overall, about 70% of the global CO2 emissions in the Global Carbon Grid v1.0 are location-based estimates, which lay the foundation for building high-resolution accurate emission maps.

The GID team will continue to develop the Global Carbon Grid products by integrating more high-resolution local emission grids and emission temporal profiles. If you are looking for more detailed emissions and potential collaboration, please contact us.

If you have any questions, please contact gid@tsinghua.edu.cn.

Related references:

Tong, D., Q. Zhang, S. J. Davis, F. Liu, B. Zheng, G. Geng, T. Xue, M. Li, C. Hong, Z. Lu, D. G. Streets, D. Guan and K. He (2018), Targeted emission reductions from global super-polluting power plant units, Nat. Sustain., 1, 59-68.

Wang, X., Y. Lei, L. Yan, T. Liu, Q. Zhang and K. He (2019), A unit-based emission inventory of SO2, NOx and PM  for the Chinese iron and steel industry from 2010 to 2015, Sci. Total Environ., 676, 18-30.

Liu, J., D. Tong, Y. Zheng, J. Cheng, X. Qin, Q. Shi, L. Yan, Y. Lei and Q. Zhang (2021), Carbon and air pollutant emissions from China’s cement industry 1990–2015: trends, evolution of technologies and drivers, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 1627–1647.

Meijer, J. R., Huijbregts, M. A. J., Schotten, K. C. G. J., and Schipper, A. M. (2018), Global patterns of current and future road infrastructure, Environ. Res. Lett., 13, 064006.

Zheng, B., Huo, H., Zhang, Q., Yao, Z. L., Wang, X. T., Yang, X. F., Liu, H., and He, K. B. (2014), High-resolution mapping of vehicle emissions in China in 2008, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 14, 9787-9805.

Liu, H., Fu, M., Jin, X. et al. Health and climate impacts of ocean-going vessels in East Asia (2016), Nat. Clim. Change. 6, 1037–1041.

Janssens-Maenhout, G., Crippa, M., Guizzardi, D., Muntean, M., Schaaf, E., Dentener, F., Bergamaschi, P., Pagliari, V., Olivier, J. G. J., Peters, J. A. H. W., van Aardenne, J. A., Monni, S., Doering, U., Petrescu, A. M. R., Solazzo, E., and Oreggioni, G. D. (2019), EDGAR v4.3.2 Global Atlas of the three major greenhouse gas emissions for the period 1970–2012, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 959-1002.

Development History >

The development of the Global Carbon Grid started in 2021 and we will keep tracking and updating emission maps periodically.

  • In April 2021, the Global Carbon Grid v1.0 product is released. This online dataset provides global 0.1°×0.1° CO2 emission maps for six source sectors in 2019, which includes power, industry, residential, transport, shipping, and aviation. Emissions of higher resolutions and emissions for other years will be available once they are finished.

Readme >

  • The Global Carbon Grid data are restricted to non-commercial purposes. Any uses of the Global Carbon Grid data by business organizations are regarded as commercial purposes which need prior authorization.
  • Any papers, reports, or products using the Global Carbon Grid data should cite the related publications and GID website completely.

How to cite >

Using Global Carbon Grid should cite the GID website (http://gidmodel.org.cn/) and the following paper:

Zhang et al. (2021), High-resolution global carbon emission grid 2019, in prep.