Recent Trends and Innovations in Modelling City Logistics

AbstractThere are many challenges associated with moving goods within cities as urban areas become larger and elderly residents require more healthcare in their homes. Air quality is also impacted by urban freight vehicles. This paper presents a review of recent trends and innovations in modelling city logistics. New techniques for modelling city logistics developed in the areas of emissions, healthcare and mega-cities are outlined. This paper describes the formulation, solution methodologies and applications of these models

Protecting the environment and the poor - a public goods framework applied to Indonesia

As is evident from public finance principles, redistribution objectives do not influence environmental policies if there are other, costless means of redistribution. How does optimal environmental protection depend on redistribution objectives? The authors develop a framework that treats air quality as a pure public good, and tracks net beneficiaries as those who value air quality improvements more than their costs in a pollution control strategy. The framework highlights the distributional characteristics of the public good and of the costs for the control strategy. One critical parameter for the distributional characteristics of the public good is the elasticity (with respect to income) of willingness to pay for environmental improvements. Strategies to control urban air pollution would be altered by redistribution objectives -- to be more aggressive in reducing emission from luxury goods such as transport (private and general) and less aggressive for goods more heavily consumed by the poor (including several energy sources). Some air pollution control strategies cover urban and rural areas, For those, optimal pollution control would typically be reduced by redistribution objectives, as rural households are net losers, and they are poorer.Pollution Management&Control,Economic Theory&Research,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Pollution Management&Control,Energy and Environment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Water and Industry

Maritime Transport - Report 1: Review of the Measurement of External Costs of Transportation in Theory and Practice

In the last years public concerns regarding the environmental impacts of maritime transport have been increasing. This is due to the fact that, despite the better environmental performance of this mode of transport with respect to other modes, its overall impacts will be out weighted by the expected increase in the volume of ship movements. In order to define effective measures to internalise the external costs of maritime transport it is necessary to assess these costs and find adequate methodologies to evaluate them. Besides external costs estimation, it is important to understand the degree of internalization of such costs, so as to give some insights on how to apply policy instruments that should be informed by efficiency and equity principles. This report summarizes the state of the art in evaluation of transport externalities. Different transport modes have been considered through a comprehensive review of theoretical and empirical studies, by carrying out both EU funded research and national studies. the analytical approach adopted to assess environmental costs (with particular reference to those relating to air emissions) in order to be applicable to maritime transport have to be adjusted to consider the following aspects. 1. The existing literature on climate change external costs focus on shadow price of CO2. However, in maritime transport other GHGs, such as NOx, are relevant. As a consequence, a shadow price for NOx needs to be defined; 2.Health effects of ship emissions depend on exposure to pollutants. Of course this occurs only for activities at ports, whilst health effects of other activities (like cruising) could turn to be negligible to the absence of exposure. Dose response function should consider this aspect.JRC.H.4-Transport and air qualit

Public health and landfill sites

Landfill management is a complex discipline, requiring very high levels of organisation, and considerable investment. Until the early 1990’s most Irish landfill sites were not managed to modern standards. Illegal landfill sites are, of course, usually not managed at all. Landfills are very active. The traditional idea of ‘put it in the ground and forget about it’ is entirely misleading. There is a lot of chemical and biological activity underground. This produces complex changes in the chemistry of the landfill, and of the emissions from the site. The main emissions of concern are landfill gases and contaminated water (which is known as leachate). Both of these emissions have complex and changing chemical compositions, and both depend critically on what has been put into the landfill. The gases spread mainly through the atmosphere, but also through the soil, while the leachate (the water) spreads through surface waters and the local groundwater. Essentially all unmanaged landfills will discharge large volumes of leachate into the local groundwater. In sites where the waste accepted has been properly regulated, and where no hazardous wastes are present, there is a lot known about the likely composition of this leachate and there is some knowledge of its likely biological and health effects. This is not the case for poorly regulated sites, where the composition of the waste accepted is unknown. It is possible to monitor the emissions from landfills, and to reduce some of the adverse health and environmental effects of these. These emissions, and hence the possible health effects, depend greatly on the content of the landfill, and on the details of the local geology and landscape. There is insufficient evidence to demonstrate a clear link between cancers and exposure to landfill, however, it is noted that there may be an association with adverse birth outcomes such as low birth weight and birth defects. It should be noted, however, that modern landfills, run in strict accordance with standard operation procedures, would have much less impact on the health of residents living in proximity to the site