A framework for gridded estimates of ammonia emissions from agriculture in South Asia

Abstract

Emissions of ammonia (NH3) from agricultural activities are a major threat to ecosystems and human health. Its quantification via emissions inventories is vital to the understanding of mitigation strategies and policy formation. South Asia, specifically the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), is a global hotspot of NH3 emissions from agriculture but also an area of great uncertainty due to a lack of data that are representative of local practices. This study presents a single implementation of a framework into which indigenous data can be ingested to adjust such estimates, to provide spatially distributed (0.1° × 0.1°) emissions in five agricultural sectors for improved input data for atmospheric chemistry transport models, by moving away from Tier 1 methods for emission inventories (Tomlinson et al., 2025). Results incorporate data such as lower emission factors of NH3 following the application of Urea (13 % of total nitrogen lost as NH3-N) to provide a total estimated emission of NH3 in the SAARC of ∼ 6 Tg (±1.2 Tg), with high values (>5 g NH3 m−2 a−1) in the Indian states Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP).