CITEAIR II project wraps up in Rome

Expert discuss air-quality management in Europe at final conference

By Andrej Klemenc, REC Slovenia

In recent decades European cities have been focusing on greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaptation, and with good reason. A non-intended side effect of these concerns was that insufficient attention has been paid to outdoor air quality. This is unfortunate, as most recent health studies conclude that, with regard to human health, there is no safe threshold for concentration of air pollutants. Indeed, the number of deaths caused by air pollution exceeds by far the number of deaths from traffic accidents.

Some climate change mitigation measures do improve ambient air quality in cities, but not all of them; thus it is imperative that air-quality issues at city level should be addressed contemporaneously with climate change issues, and not afterwards. The EU’s Green Paper on climate change recommends providing support for knowledge of both air-quality and climate change action plans, as well as furnishing local authorities with better information on how to deal with both challenges. In any case, any city needs good data on GHG and air pollutants and should benefit from integrated inventories. At the same time comprehensive and understandable data must be used to inform the public in order to increase acceptance of measures to effectively tackle climate change and air pollution.

 

The CITEAIR II project was developed to provide European cities and their inhabitants with tools to address in these issues of vital importance in a comprehensive way, and to help cities explore synergies and win-win scenarios for managing climate change, air quality and urban traffic. Having achieved these aims, the project drew to a close with a final conference held in Rome on June 24, 2011. The conference was organised by Roma Servizi per la Mobilita S.r.l., a key project partner, and drew together approximately 50 experts from all over Europe. Marco Visconti, Councillor for the Environment of Rome Capital, opened the event with remarks concerning the current state of the environment in a city known not only for its rich history and legendary beauty, but also for its frantic and congested traffic. What follows are brief synopses of presentations from speakers at the closing event.

Summing up

Karine Leger, director of AIRARIF, CITEAIR II’s lead partner, summarised project partners, structure, activities and expected results. Leger detailed the exposure of EU cities and regions to air pollution and emerging impacts of climate change. She added that an existing wealth of knowledge and already-established good practices can provide the public with simple, up-to-date information on air quality.

INTERREG 4C Joint Technical Secretariat Officer Silke Brocks noted that CITEAIR II succeeded in identifying 19 good practices and achieved relevant and durable results, which she attributed chiefly to a good, widely-disseminated communication strategy. “CITEAIR II is one of our best projects,” said Brocks, “and it is frequently used as an example to illustrate the success of INTERREG IVC projects to the EU Commission and EU Member States.”

In addressing present and forthcoming policy, Emile de Saeger from the European Commission’s DG Environment pointed out that, although air pollutants have been significantly reduced and are more completely understood, air-related health problems are likely to persist beyond 2020. Citing the need for urgent action, Saeger explained that while operational programmes under the EU’s Cohesion Policy (2007—2013) allocated approximately EUR 1 billion for air-quality-related measures by end-2009, just 6 percent of this sum has been committed to specific projects. A further EUR 100 million remains available through 2013 for relevant actions on energy efficiency, buildings, renewables, clean transport, eco-innovation and green procurement.

At present, Saeger continued, the EC is reviewing ambient-air-quality legislation and national emissions ceilings through the Directive 2001/80/EC (2007) and Gothenburg Protocol (2011), respectively. Review is needed due both to poor implementation and mounting evidence of impacts on the health of children, biodiversity and ecosystems. Saeger also spoke of new challenges (e.g. ultrafine particles, black carbon and soot), new opportunities (e.g. Europe 2020 objectives, Innovation Agenda) and the emergence of new, long-term objectives.

In his presentation on the health effects of air pollution, World Health Organization representative Pierpaolo Mudu underlined the scientific community’s heightened concern about the exposure of vulnerable groups to air pollution, especially children, the elderly and persons suffering from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Mudu insisted that developed countries should be focusing on the transport sector, which has emerged in the past two decades as the greatest general health risk to urban populations.

Exchanging ideas, briding differences

“Disagreements are normal when discussing complex environmental problems,” asserted Yorgos Remvikos from the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines in a presentation titled ‘Communication, uncertainties and other obstacles to proper air-quality management’. Remvikos claimed that CITEAIR II project participants have benefited from exchanging ideas and bridging differences, and have become more confident about commonly held views and better prepared to enter into future negotiations. Nevertheless, overarching consensus on how to improve ambient air quality has proved elusive thus far. Thus the aim of dialogue, Remvikos concluded, is not to solve disagreements so much as it is to highlight them, and to organise information and knowledge needed.

Giovanna Rossi from the Directorate for Sustainable Development, Climate and Energy of the Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea presented Italy’s priorities on sustainable mobility, touching on the approaches and methodologies of some 187 EIA-related projects funded since 2007.

AIRPAIF’s Arthur de Pas gave a presentation on how the internet and mobile (smart) phones can serve to inform the public on urban air quality. Within CITEAIR II, the interactive web service <www.airqualitynow.eu> has been updated, translated into eight (soon to be ten) languages, and is accessible via Twitter and Facebook. At present the application provides near real-time and multilingual air-quality information from more than 90 European local and regional authorities. A mobility indicator was recently added, and a simplified web application for smart-phone users will appear very soon. Any European city is free to join.

A consideration of methods for upgrading the Common Air Quality Index (CAQI) was at heart of a presentation from DCMR’s Sef van Elshout.The main objective of the CAQI is to raise awareness of air quality through various comparisons, such as local events (rush hour, afternoon smog, thermal inversion, hot or cool weather) and index readings from other cities. The worst pollutant determines the index at any given moment, whereas the monitoring station recording the worst level of pollution for a given city determines the index on www.airqualitynow.eu. Growing concerns about PM_2.5 concentrations in urban areas has led to an attempt within CITEAIR II to update CAQI to include this compound in future index readings.

The CITEAIR II approach towards designing a CAQI-based, city-level air-quality forecast was detailed by Anthony Ung from INERIS. The main advantages of the design are ease of application, speed and flexibility with regard to the target station and pollutant. Calculations mix chemical transport modelling and in situ data from measuring stations in order to provide forecasts for the current day and the next.

Marseille, France was one of the first cities to use the CITEAIR II urban air-quality forecast. Jonathan Virga from Atmo PACA shared what was learned as a result, explained how the statistical model was set up and validated, and described future activities in the field of urban air-quality forecasting. Atmo PACA plans to update the Marseille statistical model using a new, regional forecasting approach, and to use this approach in other cities throughout the region.

Breathing easier

In order to design consistent air-quality and climate change policies, cities need to establish and maintain an integrated emissions inventory (EI), which is a demanding task, according to DCMR’s Bart Wester. “Cities profit from integrated inventories of GHG emissions and air pollutants, both in terms of monitoring and designing tools and measures to mitigate both in a coordinated way,” Wester said. An integrated EI is relevant for cities with many different emission sources active, and for cities where traffic is the primary source of CO₂ emissions and air pollution, Wester explained. In the first case, cities need to store all data in a single database; in the second, there is no need for a new database because the data can be calculated on the basis of road network description and emission factors for CO₂ and air pollutants. Even in cities without a need for an integrated emission management system, making efforts to establish one can be useful for tracking regionalisation of emissions and adequacy of national emission factors within a local context, and for estimating differences between bottom-up and top-down approaches to reducing traffic emissions, Wester noted.

The Sustainable Mobility Indicator, one of the main CITEAIR II products, captured the public’s interest at the conference. Marco Cianfano from Service Mobility Agency of Rome explained to the audience the benchmarking of traffic and its impact on the environment is the mobility indicator’s key objective. The mobility indicator presents highly complex urban-transport phenomena in an easy-to-read way to describe traffic impacts in urban agglomerations. Vehicle speed and traffic flows are measured in each city with any available technology. The structure has to be flexible enough to consider variables such as time, spatial scale and different transport modes. The methodology has thus far been applied in Paris and Rome on the basis of real data and traffic models from both cities. Compared results prove that single indicators are inconclusive, while average vehicle speed is easiest to measure, while average travel time very much depends on the characteristics of each city. Cianfano concluded his presentation by demonstrating a web-based application for making such calculations.

 

The importance and use of mobility benchmarking was the topic of a very dynamic presentation by Michael Aherne from the National Transport Authority of Ireland. Aherne referred to the Dutch approach of transport management, which is based on defining what one wants to achieve, knowing what is happening, coming up with solutions, taking decisions and putting them into practice. He then questioned the effectiveness of various EU directives while emphasising that urban mobility is always multimodal, multi-objective, multi-actor and multi-stakeholder. Citing the example of the Dublin Transport Strategy, Aherne demonstrated that a good strategy needs well-elaborated performance indicators, should strengthen communities and improve economic competitiveness and the built environment, respect and sustain the natural environment, as well as reduce personal stress.

PowerPoint presentations from the conference can be found here.