Activity

Activities in GAINS represent various source categories of socio-economic activities. They can correspond to fuel combustion (e.g. coal combustion) or non-combustion categories (e.g., number of electric vehicles or animals in agricultural sectors). These activities can be related to multiple sectors (cross-reference), such as energy, macroeconomics, or agriculture, and need to be combined with a sector build a meaningful emission driver. In practice, this means that every of the 842 legitimate sector-activity combinations of the model is associated with its specific emission factor and responsible for the emissions of one or several pollutants.

For example, the activity hard coal grade 1 (HC1) can be used in the power plants sector but also in the domestic or the industrial one. Similarly, the sector of chemical industrial boilers (IN_BO_CHEM) can be related to various activities that are the fuels used in those boilers, i.e., gaseous fuels (GAS), hard coal grade 1 (HC1), heavy fuel oil(HF), etc. In road transport sectors, activities exist both in terms of combustion of different fuels as well as vehicle mileage. The former is associated with exhaust emissions while the latter drives the non-exhaust emissions (road abrasion, brake and tyre wear). Activities may be further subdivided; for instance, coal can be divided into hard coal (grade 1), hard coal (grade 2), etc.

For a comprehensive list of the 147 activities used in the model, please visit the activity glossary page.