European Commission
EDGAR - Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research

  • Dataset

Global Mercury Emissions

EDGAR v8.1

Introduction

EDGARv8.1 provides emissions not only for the greenhouse gases and air pollutants per sector and country but also for toxic pollutants such as mercury.

EDGARv8.1_toxHg includes:

  • Total mercury (Hg)
  • and mercury species:
    • Gaseous elemental mercury (Hg0; Hg_G)
    • Gaseous oxidised mercury (Hg2+; Hg_D)
    • Particle-bound mercury (Hg-P; Hg_P)

Emissions from large scale biomass burning with Savannah burning, forest fires, and sources and sinks from land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) are excluded.

For the energy related sectors the activity data are primarily based on IEA data from IEA (2022) World Energy Balances, (www.iea.org), all rights reserved, as modified by Joint Research Centre, European Commission, whereas the activity data for the agricultural sectors originate primarily from FAO (2022) (https://www.fao.org/faostat). United States Geological Survey (USGS), UNFCCC and World Steel Association (worldsteel) recent statistics are also used for activity data. The emissions from Artisanal Small Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) sector were updated based on information from publicly available reports and scientific literature; it is foreseen a refinement of these emissions based on the information from official national reporting to the Minamata Convention on Mercury in the framework of the First Effectiveness Evaluation. Additional information can be found in Muntean et al. (2025, in preparation).

Compared to the previous EDGAR version, v4.tox2, the following major updates have been included:

  • Update of activity data up to 2022
  • Updates of technology penetration and abatement measures for power generation sector
  • New spatial proxies as described in Crippa et al. (2024).

Time series (1970-2022)

Monthly time series (2000-2022)

Annual gridmaps (1970-2022)

Annual sector-specific gridmaps (1970-2022)

Monthly sector-specific gridmaps (2000-2022)

Sources and references

Marilena Muntean, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Shaojie Song, Amanda Giang, Noelle E. Selin, Hui Zhong, Yu Zhao, Jos G.J. Olivier, Diego Guizzardi, Monica Crippa, Edwin Schaaf, Frank Dentener, Evaluating EDGARv4.tox2 speciated mercury emissions ex-post scenarios and their impacts on modelled global and regional wet deposition patterns, Atmospheric Environment, Volume 184, 2018, Pages 56-68, ISSN 1352-2310, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2018.04.017.

Muntean, M., Janssens-Maenhout, G., Song, S., Selin, N. E., Olivier, J. G. J., Guizzardi, D., Maas, R., Dentener, F.: Trend analysis from 1970 to 2008 and model evaluation of EDGARv4 global gridded anthropogenic mercury emissions., Science of the Total Environment 494–495 (2014) 337–350, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.06.014

Crippa, M., Guizzardi, D., Pagani, F., Schiavina, M., Melchiorri, M., Pisoni, E., Graziosi, F., Muntean, M., Maes, J., Dijkstra, L., Van Damme, M., Clarisse, L., and Coheur, P.: Insights into the spatial distribution of global, national, and subnational greenhouse gas emissions in the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR v8.0), Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 2811–2830, doi:10.5194/essd-16-2811-2024, 2024.

Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Huang, G., Guizzardi, D., Koffi, E., Muntean, M., Schieberle, C., Friedrich, R. and Janssens-Maenhout, G.: High resolution temporal profiles in the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. Sci Data 7, 121 (2020). doi:10.1038/s41597-020-0462-2.

IEA World Energy Balances 2022 Edition, www.iea.org/data-and-statistics, All rights reserved, as modified by Joint Research Centre, European Commission.

FAOSTAT, Statistics Division of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN: www.fao.org/faostat, Last access April 2023.

USGS, USGS Commodity Statistics (June 2022), (www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/commodity-statistics-and-information), 2023, Last access: May 2023.

World Steel Association, (worldsteel) , Steel Statistical Yearbook 2021, https://worldsteel.org/steel-topics/statistics/annual-production-steel-data/?ind=P1_crude_steel_total_pub/CHN, 2023, Last access: May 2023.

Conditions of use

Users of the data are obliged to acknowledge the source of the data with a reference to the EDGARv8.1 toxic pollutant website (link), to Muntean et al. (2024, in preparation) and to the DOI (link).

Co-authorship and involvement of the EDGAR Team in the emission data analysis is highly appreciated. User's comments and requests can be sent via email (JRC-EDGAR@ec.europa.eu) to the authors.

How to cite

Muntean, Marilena; Crippa, Monica; Guizzardi, Diego; Pagani, Federico; Becker, William; Banja, Manjola; Schaaf, Edwin; Simonati, Andrea (2024): EDGAR v8.1 Global Mercury Emissions. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) [Dataset] doi:10.2905/83b507d7-5218-4dc5-95f9-0ec36f073204 PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/83b507d7-5218-4dc5-95f9-0ec36f073204

Contacts

For more information or data: JRC-EDGAR@ec.europa.eu