Emission of pollutants in various Asian countries

The rapid growth of industrialization and urbanization and a significant increase in agricultural production in East Asia have caused a remarkable increase in SO2 and NOx emissions during the past several decades. The consequences of these growing emissions have been closely connected with enforced acidification loading on ecosystems and that results in actual and potential risk to many sensitive ecosystems. 

Air pollution is an emerging important environmental problem in Asia as a whole, and especially in East Asia. Evergrowing emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ammonia and ground level ozone concentration in many big cities in this region make the people worry about the synergetic effects of various pollutants. 

The primary man-made source of sulfur and nitrogen acidifying compounds in Asia is low quality fossil fuel with high content of sulfur (up to 7% in Thai lignite, Chinese and Indian brown coal, etc.) and nitrogen (heavy oil and gas). 

The eastern coast of China is the highest emission region in the Asian domain and possibly, with sharply decreasing sulfur dioxide emissions in Central Europe and East USA, in the whole world. This emission coincides with both energy production and population growth in this part of China. The other parts of China, such as the western part, are not so abundant in population and industrial sources as the eastern coast and these differences point out the spatial heterogeneity in emission of sulfur dioxide. As an example we can cite estimates of spatial distribution of SO2 emission in China from 1990 until 1995 with 1° x 1° Longitude-Latitude (LoLa) resolution (Bai Naibin, 1997). 

The methodology for calculating any gas emission is based on accounting emission sources in specified regions, types of fuel consumed and the content of pollutants in this fuel. In the case of China s emission inventory the method was as follows. 

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