The PRIMAP-hist national historical emissions time series

Abstract. To assess the history of greenhouse gas emissions and individual countries' contributions to emissions and climate change, detailed historical data is needed. We combine several published datasets to create a comprehensive set of emission pathways of each country and Kyoto gas covering the years 1850 to 2014 for all UNFCCC member states as well as most non-UNFCCC territories. The sectoral resolution is that of the main IPCC 1996 categories. Additional subsectors are available for time series of CO2 from energy and industry. Country resolved data is combined from different sources and supplemented using growth rates from region resolved sources and numerical extrapolations to complete the dataset. Regional deforestation emissions are downscaled to country level using estimates of the deforested area obtained from potential vegetation and simulations of agricultural land. In this paper, we discuss the data sources and methods used and present the resulting dataset including its limitations and uncertainties. The dataset is available from http://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2016.003 and can be viewed on the website accompanying this paper (www.pik-potsdam.de/primap-live/primap-hist/).