The paper reviews base-year emission inventories, driving forces, and long-term scenarios of sulfur emissions as background material for developing a new set of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission scenarios. The paper concludes that future sulfur emission trends will be spatially heterogeneous (decline in OECD countries, rapid increase particularly in Asia) and therefore cannot be modeled on a global scale only. In view of ecosystems and food production impacts future sulfur emissions will also need to be increasingly controlled outside OECD countries. As a result, future sulfur emissions are likely to remain significantly below the values projected in the previous IPCC IS92 high emission scenarios.