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).