Author(s)

M. Morán, J. A. Souto-Gonzalez & M. Dios

Abstract

Cattle production has a significant contribution to the total GHGs emissions, particularly, CH4 and N2O. Also, other air pollutants, as NH3 and NMVOC, are emitted. As a European region with significant dairy and beef farms, Galicia (NW of Spain) is suitable to assess the contribution of cattle production to the regional livestock air pollutants emissions (namely, EMEP S10 in SNAP classification), considering up to date activity data. Therefore, the objective of this study is to update the annual emissions by dairy and beef cattle in Galicia, according to the different bottom-up methodologies: IPCC (Tier 1 and Tier 2) and EMEP/CORINAIR. This inventory is compared to both EMEP and E-PRTR emissions inventories: NH3 cattle emissions are around half of EMEP S10, taking into account that EMEP S10 also includes other agriculture sources. NMVOCs cattle emissions are strongly higher than EMEP S10 emissions; moreover, there is no agreement in this region between S10 EMEP emissions and cattle farms geographical distributions. Besides E-PRTR does not include cattle farms emissions, CH4 and NH3 cattle emissions are 900 and 8 times higher than total current E-PRTR declared emissions at the same region: to add cattle farms in E-PRTR activities is highly recommended.

Keywords

cattle emissions, bottom-up inventory, EMEP, PRTR.