Residential heating emissions for the Western Balkans

Abstract. Air pollution adversely effects health, ecosystems and infrastructure. In the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo¹, Montenegro, 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 high resolution spatial distribution, especially for enabling remediation efforts.

In this work we have calculated air pollution emissions from 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 artifical intelligence (AI) methods. The building data has been combined with geospatial landuse datasets as well as statistical data for heating needs for residential buildings in the countries included, and finally with emission factors to calculate the heating emissions.

The resulting datasets provides high-resolution heating emission data for common pollutants and are published as open data (Asker, 2024) . 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.

¹All references to Kosovo in this document shall be understood to be in the context of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999)