GHG Mitigation Potentials and Costs in the Transport Sector of Annex I Countries: Methodology, Version 2

This report documents the specific methodology of IIASA's GAINS model for emissions from transport activities that has been used for comparing mitigation efforts across Annex I Parties. Additional information sources are available at gains.iiasa.ac.at/Annex1.htm

European experience in the development of the monitoring, review, and verification (MRV) systems for clean air plans

Over the last decades the European Union has established strict air quality objectives, together with a comprehensive legal framework that should facilitate the achievements of these objectives. As a consequence, air quality has drastically improved in Europe, although the long-term objectives are still not met. The EU clean air legislation played an important role in these air quality improvements. Most importantly, the legal framework provided an effective response mechanism strategy to manage the complex interlinkages between the multitude of pollution sources and the regionally dispersed impacts on air quality which span across different legislation. These connections, which are a direct consequence of the physical nature of the key air pollutants (i.e., their long residence time in the atmosphere), make response strategies that extend beyond individual cities and countries indispensable. In order to implement effective policy responses, the area of the European Union is now considered as one airshed containing 27 Member States, and action needs to be coordinated between countries, regions, and city administrations. The clean air legislation of the EU acknowledges that the European Union as a supra-national institution has to play an important coordinating role in the policy response. It has been found practical to combine three legal pillars into a comprehensive EU clean air legislation framework: • The Ambient Air Quality Directives, • The National Emission Ceilings Directive, and • Source-specific performance standards. One important feature of EU policy that contributed to the success is that, in addition to the key obligations for reaching air quality standards and reducing emissions, all directives contain specific requirements and mechanisms for monitoring, reporting, validation and enforcement. Although the recent nature of some of the directives does not always allow for practical experience, systematic stock-taking on the strengths and weaknesses of older legislation has been recently conducted. This report summarizes the findings emerging from these assessments and indicates options for improvements that could be of interest for the design of effective clean air policies in other parts of the world. While the EU legal framework has obviously been developed for the EU situation, there might be important lessons, particularly on monitoring, review and verification, that could provide relevant insights for other countries which face similar complexities in air quality management, e.g., the need to involve multiple governance levels across State borders

Impact of NOx vehicle emission standards failure on Air Quality in Europe

Vehicle exhaust emission standards have been tightened in the EU for several decades now, in order to protect health and the environment. This has led to a substantial decrease in total pollutant emissions, despite the growing volumes of passenger and freight transport. However, national emissions, particularly of NOx, exceed the ceilings accorded under the Gothenburg Protocol of the UNECE's Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) (EEA 2012) in twelve EU Member States. The main reasons for such exceedances are that more diesel cars have been sold than originally predicted when fixing the targets, and that diesel cars emit much more than expected under real-world driving conditions. The latter appears as a consequence of the effort to achieve high fuel efficiency. While this has largely helped to control CO2 emissions, it was to the detriment of NOx. In this study we estimate what the impact of the different vehicle emission standards has been so far and to predict what the impact of upcoming emission standards will be in the future, using the best current knowledge on road transport activity statistics and emission factors in Europe. We present several sensitivity calculations to reflect the considerable uncertainty about the real-driving NOx emissions of diesel light duty vehicles. The results of this work can be useful in designing both limits for upcoming standards but also in assessing the impact of deviating from such limits. This is necessary in both deciding on the next steps of emission control policy and to relevant air quality prediction models