Inventory of anthropogenic methane emissions in mainland China from 1980 to 2010

International audienceMethane (CH 4) has a 28-fold greater global warming potential than CO 2 over 100 years. Atmospheric CH 4 concentration has tripled since 1750. Anthropogenic CH 4 emissions from China have been growing rapidly in the past decades and contribute more than 10 % of global anthro-pogenic CH 4 emissions with large uncertainties in existing global inventories, generally limited to country-scale statistics. To date, a long-term CH 4 emission inventory including the major sources sectors and based on province-level emission factors is still lacking. In this study, we produced a detailed annual bottom-up inventory of anthropogenic CH 4 emissions from the eight major source sectors in China for the period 1980-2010. In the past 3 decades, the total CH 4 emissions increased from 24.4 [18.6-30.5] Tg CH 4 yr −1 in 1980 (mean [minimum-maximum of 95 % confidence in-terval]) to 44.9 [36.6-56.4] Tg CH 4 yr −1 in 2010. Most of this increase took place in the 2000s decade with averaged yearly emissions of 38.5 [30.6-48.3] Tg CH 4 yr −1. This fast increase of the total CH 4 emissions after 2000 is mainly driven by CH 4 emissions from coal exploitation. The largest contribution to total CH 4 emissions also shifted from rice cultivation in 1980 to coal exploitation in 2010. The total emissions inferred in this work compare well with the EPA inventory but appear to be 36 and 18 % lower than the EDGAR4.2 inventory and the estimates using the same method but IPCC default emission factors, respectively. The uncertainty of our inventory is investigated using emission factors collected from state-of-the-art published literatures. We also distributed province-scale emissions into 0.1 • × 0.1 • maps using socioeconomic activity data. This new inventory could help understanding CH 4 budgets at regional scale and guiding CH 4 mitigation policies in China