Estimating NUTS3-level CO2-emission rates in Europe

Abstract

The regional efforts supporting the transformation to a low carbon and resource efficient economy suffers in many regions from a lack of data on the production and use of fossil and other energy within the territory of the region. This paper presents estimates of CO2-emissions at the NUTS3 level derived from the EDGAR database. The database contains CO2-emissions that are derived from national emission records and distributed to a 0.1x0.1 degree grid using surrogate variables reflecting population, production, plants, reported point source emissions etc. The derived NUTS3 level emission rates do, however not meet the needs of the regional economic development efforts. First, they only to a limited degree reflect the production and use of fossil fuels, which results in side uncertainties. Second, they do not reflect changes in from fossil to other energy carriers and progress in energy efficincy in any region beyond the changes at the national level. Thus, they are not useful for monitoring progress in these transformations. They do, however, show that even within each country the regions differ widely in their production and use of fossil energy and regional strategies for transformation are.