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To mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutant emissions, it is of utmost importance to understand where emissions occur. In the real world, atmospheric pollutants are produced by various human activities from point sources (e.g. power plants and industrial facilities) but also from diffuse sources (e.g. residential activities and agriculture). However, as tracking all these single sources of emissions is practically impossible, emission inventories are typically compiled using national-level statistics by sector, which are then downscaled at the grid-cell level using spatial information. In this work, we develop high-spatial-resolution proxies for use in downscaling the national emission totals for all world countries provided by the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR). In particular, in this paper, we present the latest EDGAR v8.0 GHG, which provides readily available emission data at different levels of spatial granularity, obtained from a consistently developed GHG emission database. This has been achieved through the improvement and development of high-resolution spatial proxies that allow for a more precise allocation of emissions over the globe. A key novelty of this work is the potential to analyse subnational GHG emissions over the European territory and also over the United States, China, India, and other high-emitting countries. These data not only meet the needs of atmospheric modellers but can also inform policymakers working in the field of climate change mitigation. For example, the EDGAR GHG emissions at the NUTS 2 level (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level 2) over Europe contribute to the development of EU cohesion policies, identifying the progress of each region towards achieving the carbon neutrality target and providing insights into the highest-emitting sectors. The data can be accessed at 10.2905/b54d8149-2864-4fb9-96b9-5fd3a020c224 specifically for EDGAR v8.0 (Crippa et al., 2023a) and 10.2905/D67EEDA8-C03E-4421-95D0-0ADC460B9658 for the subnational dataset (Crippa et al., 2023b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowing where emissions occur is essential for planning effective emission reduction measures and for atmospheric modelling. Emission inventories are typically compiled at national level and provide sector-specific emission estimates. Disaggregating national emissions on high-resolution grids requires spatial proxies that contain information on the location of different emission sources (e.g. point sources, linear and area sources). Knowing the correct allocation of emissions from point sources is essential to avoid the misallocating high emission levels. However, gathering information on point sources covering the entire globe and a wide temporal domain (1970 to present) is challenging due to limited data availability, accuracy of the reporting and completeness of data. The latest spatial proxies developed as part of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv8.0) provide the user with the possibility to work with different geographical details using a consistently developed GHG emissions database. A key novelty of EDGARv8.0 is the possibility to analyse sub-national GHG emissions over the European domain, but also over the US, China, India and main world countries. The relevance of using updated spatial information is assessed on the basis of regional case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]