Title, content, preface and acknowledgements.

Preface

CORINAIR 90 is a study of emissions of air pollutants in Europe. It was initiated by the European Environment Agency Task Force and was part of the CORINE (COoRdination d'INformation Environmentale) work programme set up by the European Council of Ministers on 27 June 1985 (Decision 85/338/EEC). The CORINAIR 90 inventory has been completed by the Euroipean Environment Agency’s Topic Centre on Air Emission (ETC/AE) as part of the Agency’s work programme.

The aim of CORINAIR 90 was to produce a complete, consistent and transparent emission inventory for the air pollutants:

• sulfur oxides (SOx as SO2 )
• nitrogen oxides (NOx as NO2)
• non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC)
• methane (CH4)
• carbon monoxide (CO)
• carbon dioxide (CO2)
• nitrous oxide (N2O)
• ammonia (NH3).

In addition to the twelve EU countries in 1990 (Belgium, Denmark, France, the former West Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and United Kingdom), the five EFTA-5 countries (Austria, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland), the ten PHARE countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia) and Croatia, Malta and former East Germany have been participating in CORINAIR 90. Data for Belgium are reported for the whole country and separately for the Flemish and Wallonie regions. For Croatia only for SOx and NOx data were available in the database and are thus reported. For the other pollutants summary tables were delivered by Croatia, which are presented in a separate annex. Therefore SOx and NOx data are presented for 31 different countries / regions and data for the other pollutants for 30 countries / regions.

The former West and East Germany are presented separately and the former East Germany has been excluded from EU-12 but included in EU-15 since the reunification of Germany did not occur until October 1990.

This emission inventory is based on the data gathered by national experts in individual countries and prepared according to a common format supplied by CITEPA (France). It is the willingness of the countries involved and their national experts to participate which has made this first European emission inventory possible.

All countries (with the exception of Switzerland) have notified the EEA that their CORINAIR 90 inventory is final. "Final" means that the inventory has been submitted to a number of consistency checks, adjustments and updates and no further changes are expected from the national expert. However, minor adjustments may be made to improve consistency between countries before publication of the Final CORINAIR 90 Report. The data for EUROPE (including all countries) and for the EU-12, EU-15 and EFTA-5 groups are also only provisional.

"Final" status data may be used freely, bearing in mind the above comment that minor changes may still occur. The data should be referenced as European Environment Agency: CORINAIR 90 Summary Report no. 1, 1995. Some data on single large point sources are not published within these reports as some of these data are confidential in many countries.

It should be noted that the data reported here from CORINAIR90 are not fully consistent with those reported in line with the IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories under the UN Framework Climate Change Convention or the EU Decision on a Monitoring Mechanism for CO2 and other greenhouse gases. CORINAIR90 data have been used by several countries as a basis for such reporting but this requires careful re-allocation and re-aggregation between reporting categories as highlighted in the IPCC Guidelines and some gaps and inconsistencies remain to be resolved between IPCC and the EEA.

It should also be noted that the data in CORINAIR 90 are not fully consistent with those in CORINAIR 85. For example the number of sources for NMVOC has been increased and emission factors for NOx for traffic are not consistent for the two datasets. Therefore no comparisons have been made for SOx, NOx and NMVOC between the data for 1985 and 1990.

The results of CORINAIR 90 appear initially in a series of three reports to be published by the European Environment Agency in 1997.

This first report provides for each pollutant the summary of CORINAIR 90. For each pollutant it gives the contribution of individual countries to the total European emissions as well as emissions per main source group, per capita and per km2 and the emissions for groups of countries (EU-12, EU-15, EFTA-5 and PHARE-10).

Further summary reports on CORINAIR 90 focus on the following items:

• report 2 presentation and analysis by sub-group split
• report 3 large point sources

These reports are being made available by the European Environment Agency for use by policy makers, researchers, convention secretariat and the general public.

The results of CORINAIR 90 provide the most detailed, complete, consistent and transparent European atmospheric emission inventory to date. However the results are estimates of actual emissions with significant uncertainties in some cases. Furthermore, some gaps and inconsistencies remain. Comments and observations on the results presented in this series of reports are welcome to assist in the short-term verification of CORINAIR 90 and the longer term development of the methodology.

Acknowledgements

The following national experts made contributions to the CORINAIR 90 exercise:

Their contributions are greatly acknowledged. Thanks also to Gordon McInnes (European Environment Agency), J.P. Fontelle and J.P. Chang (CITEPA) for organising and managing the CORINAIR 90 exercise and to Mr. Z. Samaras (Aristotle University Thessaloniki) and M. K.-H. Zierock (EnviCon) for their contribution to transport emission data.