Residential heating emissions for the Western Balkans

Abstract

Air pollution adversely affects health, ecosystems, and infrastructure. In the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, KosovoAll references to Kosovo in this document shall be understood to be in the context of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999)., Montenegro, the Republic of North Macedonia, and Serbia), the air pollution situation is more adverse than in the European Union in general. Understanding the air quality situation requires high-quality emission data with a high-resolution spatial distribution, especially for enabling remediation efforts, which is lacking in the Western Balkan region. In this work, we have calculated air pollution emissions from the heating of individual housing units in the Western Balkan region. The basis for the dataset is a geographical dataset of buildings detected from satellite imagery by artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The building data have been combined with geospatial land-use datasets and statistical data for heating needs for residential buildings in the countries included and finally with emission factors to calculate the heating emissions. Using this novel approach, the resulting datasets provide high-resolution heating emission data for common pollutants and are published as open data (10.5281/zenodo.13906810, ). When comparing national totals for emissions, the datasets in this work are comparable to other, spatially coarser datasets, though the agreement strongly depends on the fuel usage data for each country/region.