Abstract. High-resolution mapping of fuel combustion and CO2 emission provides valuable information for inferring terrestrial carbon balance, modeling pollutant transport, and developing mitigation strategies. Previous inventories included only a limited number of fuel types and anthropogenic emissions were mapped using national population proxies which may distort the geographical distribution within countries. In this study, a sub-national disaggregation method (SDM) was applied to establish a global 0.1°×0.1° geo-referenced inventory of fuel combustion (PKU-FUEL) and a corresponding CO2 emission inventory (PKU-CO2) based upon 64 fuel sub-types for the year 2007. Uncertainties of the new inventories were evaluated using a Monte Carlo method. The total combustion CO2 emission in 2007 was 11.2 (9.11 and 13.3 as 5th and 95th percentiles) Pg C yr−1. By replacing national disaggregation with sub-national disaggregation in this study, the average 95th minus 5th percentile ranges of CO2 emission for all grids can be reduced from 417 to 68.2 Mg km−2 yr−1, indicating a significant reduction in uncertainty, because the uneven distribution of per-capita fuel consumptions within countries has been taken into account by using the sub-national fuel consumption data directly. Significant difference in per-capita CO2 emissions between urban and rural areas was found in developing nations (2.09 vs. 0.600 Mg C cap−1 yr−1), but not in developed ones (3.57 vs. 3.42 Mg C cap−1 yr−1), suggesting strong influence of the rapid urbanization of these countries on the carbon emission. By using the CO2 emission product, a new spatial pattern of terrestrial carbon sink was derived and the impact of sub-national disaggregation is discussed.