Emission inventories are the foundation of air quality management. Although current inventories capability support many emission management and regulatory activities, they have shortcomings that could be reduced by application of improved inventory development, analysis and dissemination techniques. These shortcomings will become serious impediments to the development of air quality management strategies as we move into the future. In the past, most air quality management goals have focused on emissions from major, relatively well-characterized sources. As these emissions decline, the remaining emissions will be more evenly distributed over source categories that are much more difficult to measure or model. Thus, errors in emissions from these smaller individual sources will have greater consequences. These consequences could range from wrongly identifying a pollutant that should be controlled to overlooking source categories whose control could result in more cost-effective management decisions.

NARSTO’s third assessment – Improving Emission Inventories for Effective Air Quality Management Across North America: A NARSTO Assessment – examines the current state of emission inventories for Canada, the United States and Mexico, and offers suggestions for improvement. The assessment is available here as a set of downloadable PDF files.