European air quality legislation puts the main emphasis on protecting human health
and the environment as a whole and stresses that “it is particularly important to
combat emissions of pollutants at source and to identify and implement the most
effective emission reduction measures at local, national and Community level.”
These basic principles have already been formulated in the former so-called air
quality framework directive (96/62/EC) and its daughter directives (1999/30/EC,
2000/69/EC, 2002/3/EC, 2004/1 007/EC).
The set of actions foreseen by the current legislation (CLE) is expected to
continue the reduction of emissions of the past decade and thus to bring a general
improvement for the decade to come. Despite this, some urban areas and some
regions will still struggle with severe air quality problems and related health effects.
These areas are often characterized by specific environmental and anthropogenic
factors and will require ad hoc additional local actions to complement medium and
long term national and EU-wide strategies to reach EU air quality objectives. At the
same time, these urban areas are among the territories where most energy is consumed and most greenhouse gases (GHGs) are emitted. The reviews of the
Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution (Amann et al. 2011; Kiesewetter et al. 2013)
have used the European air pollution model GAINS to study the trends of compliance evolution from the base year 2010–2025 (assuming current legislation
only), the improvement for a 2025 scenario and the further compliance achieved in
2030 by implementing all technical measures (Maximum Technically Feasible
emission Reductions, MTFR). The assessment of compliance of the daily PM10
exceedances limit value with respect to the current Ambient Air Quality Directive is
shown in Fig. 1.6.
Some important observations can be derived from these figures.
Comparing the 2010 map with the 2025 CLE case, it clearly appears the move
away from a general picture of non-compliance (2010) to few limited remaining
areas of non-compliance. European wide measures (already mandated) will determine a significant improvement in compliance especially in the old EU-15 Member
States. What is also clear by comparing the 2025 CLE with the 2025 A5 (defined as
‘central policy scenario’) is the limited potential of further EU-wide measures to
improve compliance; this is further underlined by the 2030 MTFR scenario, that
shows still various areas of uncertain or unlikely compliance even when adopting
all the available abatement technologies.
Introducing tougher European-wide measures to address residual noncompliance confined to 10 % of the urban zones in Europe would likely be significantly more costly than directly addressing these areas with specifically
designed measures based on bottom-up Integrated Assessment (IA) approach using
regional/local data. In this regard, regional IA software tools such as RIAT
(Carnevale et al. 2012), LEAQ (Zachary et al. 2011), etc. with their ability to
identify cost-optimised local strategies are already available to quantify the
cost-effective split between further European wide measures and regional/local
measures. They will inevitably find wider application and play an increasing role in
these emerging ‘discrete islands of non-compliance’.
6
G. Guariso and M. Volta
and the environment as a whole and stresses that “it is particularly important to
combat emissions of pollutants at source and to identify and implement the most
effective emission reduction measures at local, national and Community level.”
These basic principles have already been formulated in the former so-called air
quality framework directive (96/62/EC) and its daughter directives (1999/30/EC,
2000/69/EC, 2002/3/EC, 2004/1 007/EC).
The set of actions foreseen by the current legislation (CLE) is expected to
continue the reduction of emissions of the past decade and thus to bring a general
improvement for the decade to come. Despite this, some urban areas and some
regions will still struggle with severe air quality problems and related health effects.
These areas are often characterized by specific environmental and anthropogenic
factors and will require ad hoc additional local actions to complement medium and
long term national and EU-wide strategies to reach EU air quality objectives. At the
same time, these urban areas are among the territories where most energy is consumed and most greenhouse gases (GHGs) are emitted. The reviews of the
Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution (Amann et al. 2011; Kiesewetter et al. 2013)
have used the European air pollution model GAINS to study the trends of compliance evolution from the base year 2010–2025 (assuming current legislation
only), the improvement for a 2025 scenario and the further compliance achieved in
2030 by implementing all technical measures (Maximum Technically Feasible
emission Reductions, MTFR). The assessment of compliance of the daily PM10
exceedances limit value with respect to the current Ambient Air Quality Directive is
shown in Fig. 1.6.
Some important observations can be derived from these figures.
Comparing the 2010 map with the 2025 CLE case, it clearly appears the move
away from a general picture of non-compliance (2010) to few limited remaining
areas of non-compliance. European wide measures (already mandated) will determine a significant improvement in compliance especially in the old EU-15 Member
States. What is also clear by comparing the 2025 CLE with the 2025 A5 (defined as
‘central policy scenario’) is the limited potential of further EU-wide measures to
improve compliance; this is further underlined by the 2030 MTFR scenario, that
shows still various areas of uncertain or unlikely compliance even when adopting
all the available abatement technologies.
Introducing tougher European-wide measures to address residual noncompliance confined to 10 % of the urban zones in Europe would likely be significantly more costly than directly addressing these areas with specifically
designed measures based on bottom-up Integrated Assessment (IA) approach using
regional/local data. In this regard, regional IA software tools such as RIAT
(Carnevale et al. 2012), LEAQ (Zachary et al. 2011), etc. with their ability to
identify cost-optimised local strategies are already available to quantify the
cost-effective split between further European wide measures and regional/local
measures. They will inevitably find wider application and play an increasing role in
these emerging ‘discrete islands of non-compliance’.
6
G. Guariso and M. Volta