2023-05-30 | MEIC Team

Atmospheric pollutants and carbon dioxide share the same origin and primarily come from the combustion and utilization of fossil fuels. Against the backdrop of China’s significant national strategies of reaching peak carbon emissions, achieving carbon neutrality, and improving air quality on an ongoing basis, it is essential to build consistent methodological systems for merging the emission inventories of atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gases. This includes compiling integrated inventories of atmospheric pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions, which support interdisciplinary research on air pollution and climate change, and promote coordinated governance and synergistic reduction of pollution and carbon emissions to enhance efficiency.

The Multi-resolution Emission Inventory for China (MEIC) covers over 700 types of anthropogenic emission sources in China, including nine major atmospheric pollutants (SO₂, N_Ox, CO, NMVOC, NH₃, PM₁₀, PM_2.5, BC, OC) and CO₂, and it allows for dynamic updates. Recently, the MEIC team has improved the long-term time series of the integrated emission inventory for anthropogenic sources of atmospheric pollutants and CO₂ in China from 1990 to 2020. The inventory includes provincial-level emissions of atmospheric pollutants and CO₂ from five major sectors and 22 sub-sectors, as well as emissions at a 0.25-degree grid resolution from the five major sectors. The new data version (v1.4) is currently available on the MEIC website. Registered users can log in to the MEIC website (http://meicmodel.org.cn) to download the emission data.

Compared to the previous version (v1.3), the new version v1.4 ensured the consistency of emission accounting methods for atmospheric pollutants and CO₂ under the same source category by establishing an integrated emission inventory accounting technical system. Additionally, the new version expanded the temporal dimension of shared data from 2008-2017 to 1990-2020 and increased the sector dimension from 5 to 22, significantly expanding the application scenarios and scope of the MEIC inventory. Furthermore, the improvements in methodology and data in version v1.4 were summarized as following: a systematic review of the implementation of various measures since the implementation of the “Three-Year Action Plan for Winning the Blue Sky Defense” and a detailed calculation of the impact of various governance measures on atmospheric pollutant and CO₂ emissions. It integrated a high-resolution emission inventory model for the cement industry based on production lines, improving the spatiotemporal representation accuracy of cement industry emissions. It also constructed a rural fuel consumption model at the county level based on household survey data, incorporating the process of clean energy substitution to characterize the dynamic changes in emissions from civil sources. NMVOC emission factors were updated in v1.4 and NMVOC emission control technology evolution model was improved, enhancing the accuracy of emission accounting.

The MEIC website provides users with a variety of interactive features, including customized data map display, thematic mapping, and data download services. We also offer convenient services for online dynamic computing, visualization analysis, and data downloading. Welcome to download the MEIC data and provide valuable feedback. The MEIC team welcome communication and cooperation in various ways. Please contact us at meic@tsinghua.edu.cn.