Carbon Monitor Europe, near-real-time daily CO$_2$ emissions for 27 EU countries and the United Kingdom

TL;DR

This paper introduces Carbon Monitor Europe, a near-real-time dataset of daily CO2 emissions for 27 EU countries and the UK, enabling timely monitoring of emission changes across sectors to support policy and public awareness.

Contribution

It provides the first near-real-time, daily CO2 emissions dataset for European countries, filling a gap left by traditional annual inventories and capturing recent emission fluctuations.

Findings

Provides daily emissions data from 2019 to 2021 for 27 EU countries and UK.

Separately estimates emissions for six sectors including power and transportation.

Enhances the timeliness and resolution of emission monitoring for policy and public use.

Abstract

With the urgent need to implement the EU countries pledges and to monitor the effectiveness of Green Deal plan, Monitoring Reporting and Verification tools are needed to track how emissions are changing for all the sectors. Current official inventories only provide annual estimates of national CO$_2$ emissions with a lag of 1+ year which do not capture the variations of emissions due to recent shocks including COVID lockdowns and economic rebounds, war in Ukraine. Here we present a near-real-time country-level dataset of daily fossil fuel and cement emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for 27 EU countries and UK, which called Carbon Monitor Europe. The data are calculated separately for six sectors: power, industry, ground transportation, domestic aviation, international aviation and residential. Daily CO$_2$ emissions are estimated from a large set of activity data compiled from different sources. The goal of this dataset is to improve the timeliness and temporal resolution of emissions for European countries, to inform the public and decision makers about current emissions changes in Europe.