Atmospheric emission data inventory for air quality planning at a regional scale

The inventory of pollutant emissions data and its management is the first step to assess the potential environmental impacts and the social-economic implications of different planning strategies. This requires to prepare a very flexible database which allows the user an easy querying of data, their up-grading, the possibility of comparing different information and to use software tools based on Geographical Information Systems to represent the localization of emissions sources and their fallout on the territory. This paper describes the pollutant emissions inventory carried out for the Basilicata Region (Southern Italy) in the framework of a regional plan for air quality and environmental recovery. This inventory was built up laking into account the most recent normative framework, and points out the most important features of the emissions sources relatively to the investigated pollutants and to the different territorial areas.