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Impact Categories considered under the GREENSENSE project
The project overview described how a framework for environmental accounting will be developed in the project, and data collected on a variety of impact categories in order to apply the framework. These pages describe the impact categories considered under the project, and the work that is planned in order to produce data that can be used to apply the framework. The impact categories are as follows:
Impact Category: Air Pollution
This work will concentrate on effects caused by priority pressures identified by the EC Pressure Indices Project in the area of ‘Air Pollution’. The focus of the calculations will be set on the three partner countries, Germany, UK, and Spain. The detailed analysis for these countries will include the estimation of effects from the main contributions of CORINAIR SNAP technical sectors and NACE economic activities. Additionally, the effects within these countries due to emissions of other countries will be assessed.
The first major task will be to extrapolate existing air pollution emission databases with high geographical resolution to further years and to estimate environmental damages from air pollution. First, Europe-wide inventories of NOX, NMVOC, SO2, NH3, CO, and particle emissions with a high geographical resolution will be extrapolated, where possible, to further years. For this purpose available emission data of CORINAIR, EMEP and TNO are taken. Second, based on existing studies a methodology will be designed to assign where possible the emissions given in technical source sectors to economic activities based on the NACE categories. After reviewing and updating dose-effect models, EcoSense will be extended before it is applied to estimate environmental impacts. EcoSense is an integrated model for impact pathway assessment that was developed within ExternE {link to ExternE} by IER and has been successfully used by numerous studies on air pollution impacts. Various databases, including e.g. data on emissions, meteorology, and population distribution, are linked to the program system. These are used together with air quality models for the estimation of impacts from air pollution. The impacts to be considered are human health effects (from SO2, CO, O3, and particles), impacts on crops (from O3, SO2, Nitrogen and Sulphur deposition) and impacts on buildings (from SO2, wet acid deposition, and particles). Specific attention will be paid to the estimation of uncertainties. This work will provide a broader basis for impact pathway assessment than used in former calculations, and will be used to analyse year to year changes in environmental impacts and their attribution to the main technical source sectors of CORINAIR database and economic activities of NACE nomenclature.
The second major task of this workpackage is to estimate the physical reduction in each type of emission, for a number of selected pollutants, required to meet existing environmental standards and identified sustainability standards. Standards that will be considered include critical levels for agricultural crops and WHO standards for Ozone. The extent to which sustainability standards, formulated on the basis of the balance between pollutant ingestion and chemical decomposition for a defined time period, are more restrictive than existing air quality targets will be investigated. The analysis is carried out by using the results of projects such as IIASA studies to Ground-level Ozone control in Europe and the EC INFOS (Assessment of Policy Instruments for Efficient Ozone Abatement Strategies in Europe) project which was coordinated by IER. Based on the insights of the participating institutes from a number of projects in this area, a multi-pollutant approach is used to account for benefits of emission reductions outside the main effects for which the reduction is primarily made.
Where possible, the emission reductions will be attributed to source sectors and economic activities.
Climate change is one of the major environmental effects of economic activity, and one of the most difficult to handle because of its broad scale and the ‘softness’ of the knowledge. It is proposed to improve upon the state of the art by drawing on recent developments in the climate change and climate change impacts literature and by refining and scrutinising some of the assumptions made in past external cost methodologies such as valuation of ecosystem and mortality impacts.
This modelling work will make significant improvements to current best practice. In particular, the work will account for a wider range of pollutants. These will include more (precursors to) atmospheric substances influencing global and regional radiative balances (see below). The modelling work will also consider a broader range of impacts including morbidity, international tourism and ecosystems. In addition, specific attention will be given to the treatment of uncertainty as the literature evolves in this area, including small probability – high probability scenarios (disruption of thermohaline circulation; collapse of West-Antarctic Ice-Sheet). Particular attention will be paid to different assumptions about discount rates and discount factors.
The work on climate change will be informed directly by the policy priority areas that have so far emerged from the Environmental Pressure Indices Project of Eurostat. The model outputs will therefore be designed to complement the physical measures identified in the work of Eurostat, that is, emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur oxides (SOx).
The output of this task will be physical data that can be used to value the current welfare loss associated with greenhouse gas emissions. While the general methodology will be developed to be applicable at the EU and global levels, data on specific issues (health effects, the sea level and effects on agriculture) will be provided for the UK, Spain and Germany. This work will also calculate the avoidance cost of meeting sustainability standards for global warming. Standards for climate change will be based on the accepted targets of member states (Germany and the Netherlands have adopted such standards) and on policy documents of other members states and the EU. Avoidance costs will be estimated using existing and accepted energy-economy models, such as DICE, FUND and MERGE.
This task will try to formulate a preliminary methodology with which to correlate changes in the EC Pressure Indices for Biodiversity loss with the damages produced by these changes on the European environment, for limited areas and indicators.
A thorough review of all existing work will be carried out, based on relevant European and non-European projects that have addressed this subject. An example of this is a project currently in progress development by one of the project partners that correlates landuse changes and ecosystem fragmentation with the loss of target species in a small German area. Other studies to be reviewed include Contingent Valuation and Travel Cost assessments for biodiversity loss.
Based on this review, a strong interaction with biodiversity experts will be required, to try to develop relationships between the pressure indices considered and biodiversity loss and its consequences for the environment. Although the monetary valuation of biodiversity effects is very difficult, these relationships will have to be developed taking into account that one of the final objectives of this project is to produce monetary estimates of environmental damage, so the physical estimation of the loss of biodiversity will have to be consistent and appropriate for the application of environmental valuation techniques such as contingent valuation, even if monetary valuation is not attempted. It has to be noted that the difficulty of obtaining these relationships is very large, so results will probably be limited to small areas and impacts.
This research will also be directed towards the estimation of sustainability levels for the pressure indices, according to the knowledge on minimal populations of flora and fauna which make that population, and the entire habitat they form, sustainable. This will allow for the determination of the physical quantities which have to be reduced for each index in order to attain sustainability standards.
Given the very high complexity of this subject only terrestrial biodiversity will be studied, and this only for limited regions in Europe. To that end, representative habitats within the three countries of the study will be selected, based on their importance or on the information and research available.
For this task there is a risk of failure, due to the difficulty in establishing these relationships. As a fall-back position, the work will provide a large review of the state of science in this area and the methodologies devised if any, will analyse the requirements that any methodology should fulfill for further incorporation to the environmental accounting framework, and will ascertain whether there is any existing research which should be extended further in order to attain the final objective of incorporating biodiversity loss into the accounting framework
The first task here is to identify the scale and nature of environmental damage from current resource depletion that are not identified in previous workpackages. For the case of the non-renewable resources oil and gas, this physical data is available at the level of the EC from the results of the EC DGXII SAUNER {insert link to SAUNER} project. A review of available damage costs will be undertaken to assign the total costs to the individual countries of the UK, Spain and Germany. For the case of renewable resources, timber will be taken as an example. Some of the costs of the loss of forestry are estimated under the category of Biodiversity. Further welfare costs are associated with the loss of forestry per se. The physical levels of these losses will be estimated using Eurostat Forestry statistics and FAO data. The values of these losses will be estimated later in the project using costs taken from the literature.
The second main task is to analyse the sustainability implications of resource depletion. The results of the SAUNER project will provide data, both for this workpackage and for WP 11 on the physical requirements for and economic costs of achieving sustainability in non-renewable resource use. Further work will be done under this workpackage on the sustainability implications of timber extraction. This will include an estimate of the timber stocks that must be preserved in order to comply with a definition of environmental sustainability, and also the physical amount by which maintenance of forestry stocks must be increased in order to guarantee sustainability of timber supplies. This will require a study of the trade status of the three countries of the study, and if possible of the EU. Currently, while the net value of the timber trade is very low, the EU is a significant net importer of timber products in terms of bulk. The sustainability of the sources of this net bulk will be studied and a judgement made as to whether the EU is "importing unsustainability" and therefore whether compensating investments need to be made, or imports reduced, to attain sustainability.
This task concentrates on the effects of emissions of substances that, even in low concentrations, are toxic to humans and other living organisms. An important characteristic of these substances is their persistence, causing them to accumulate in living tissue. This makes the effects long term, and thus an important issue for sustainability analysis.
The first major task is to estimate environmental impacts from toxic substances like heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), benzene, and radioactive substances. First, the data on emissions to the atmosphere compiled in the Air Pollution category are extended to emissions of toxic substances. Therefore, available data on emission activities and emission factors provided by the German Federal Environment Agency and TNO, which include Europe-wide emissions of heavy metals and different POPs for about fifty source sectors, are used as a basis. The analysis of the atmospheric effects will be carried out by considering also effects caused by other countries. Second, a first rough estimation of emissions to water and soil via direct intake or indirect intake due to atmospheric pollution is carried out. Data on direct emissions are collected via a literature and data survey. For the estimation of indirect emissions, the air quality models used in WP 2 will be modified. The simulation of processes in soil and water will be carried out by applying the location independent model EUSES (European Union System for the Evaluation of Substances). This can be done for substances for which specific data necessary for the use of EUSES are available. A calculation to endpoints will be attempted, but may be not possible, because the model is site unspecific. In a next step studies of dose-effect models for toxic substances will be reviewed and categorised before applicable models are implemented into the EcoSense program system developed by IER. Where possible, the environmental and health impacts of toxic substances under study will be quantified using EcoSense. Typical pathways by which these substances affect human health are ingestion of poisons due to chemicals in food and in drinking water and respiration of polluted air. It is possible that health effects will not be assessable for many of the pathways, because exposure response models are yet unknown. One of the major contributions of this work will be to improve on earlier work in the area of impact pathway analysis by extending the range of pollutants and impacts under consideration.
The second major task under this is to estimate the physical reduction in emissions that would be required to comply with sustainability standards. As a first step, existing standards will be reviewed and categorised in order to asses their suitability as sustainability standards. Existing studies will be reviewed and applicable results adopted. In addition, the models used for the impact assessment will be applied, where possible, to estimate the amount by which standards are exceeded and therefore the emission reductions required to meet the standards. In an additional impact pathway analysis the positive side-effects of emission reductions are estimated in order to include the results in the accounting framework {link to page 1a} developed earlier in the project.
This task focuses particularly on the urban problems of economic activity. Since the problem of air pollution is dealt with in WP2, the work addresses the problem of traffic noise. The analysis will concentrate on the countries of the partner organisations, where we have access to the most comprehensive data sources.
The first main task is to quantify the impacts on human health from urban noise pollution. The first step is the estimation of the population’s exposure to specific traffic noise. Road, rail and air transport will be included as the most important modes contributing to urban noise problems. The work will be based upon methods developed by IER within the DGVII project UNITE. Results of the application of noise models in case studies will be analysed in order to determine relevant parameters for the extrapolation to national and European scale to serve as input for policy decisions. Beyond the objectives of the UNITE project, the allocation of burdens to the most important NACE economic sectors is a main goal here. The estimated noise levels are used in a second step, where possible, to derive human health impacts. Therefore, literature on effects of noise to human health will be reviewed to establish a set of exposure response relations. These are then used together with available population data and the estimated noise levels to derive human health impacts.
Noise pollution does not lend itself well to sustainability analysis, since it is not persistent. However, as a second task a review of existing literature on avoidance measures will be performed and study results will be analysed in order to carry out a first rough estimation of noise reductions required to meet World Health Organisation safety standards.
This task will rely on the information contained in the EC Pressure Indices Project, which tries to identify the volume of waste generated in Europe: waste landfilled, waste incinerated, hazardous waste, municipal waste, or waste recycled; and extend it along the impact pathway, by determining the impacts caused by these pressures on the European environment. Some EC projects have already developed methodologies for assessing these impacts, such as the ExternE project, which has proposed methods for estimating the impacts of landfills and waste incinerators. However, most of them have focused on air pollution impacts. This task will use the results of the ExternE project, and will try to extend the methodology to cover other important impacts, such as visual amenity, odours, or soil pollution, and other waste management alternatives; and also to apply the methodology to the different situations that may arise in Europe.
In addition, this task will estimate the physical reduction in damages required for the appropriate sustainability standards to be met. These standards will have to be determined in some cases. For example, sustainability standards regarding the physical volume of the waste, or the soil pollution it may cause will have to be produced based on soil use restrictions or soil carrying capacity. In other cases these standards will be derived from the corresponding air or water pollution standards (drawing from the information produced in other work packages of this project).
These estimates will be made for the problems of waste for urban areas in Spain, which can be considered as representative of the waste problems in other urban European areas, and if data allows, the estimates will be made for representative urban areas in the UK and Germany also.
The task will consider the impacts of water pollution from additional emissions affecting water quality such as nutrient concentrations and biological oxygen demand, and will be strongly linked to the work on waste. Previous analysis of water quality data across Europe has shown that the levels of data are inconsistent, and so the study may have to concentrate on one or two countries or examples where good data exists. Data will be examined in the first instance for the UK, Spain and Germany.
The task will estimate the impacts from the levels of pollution on aquatic ecosystems, and the risk to drinking water quality, through water abstraction. Because of the site-specific nature of water pollution, it is not possible to use the impact pathway approach in the same way as for air pollution. However, the task will attempt to value possible impacts, either using information on ecosystems, or using surrogate values for the state of the water environment.
The task will also assess sustainable levels of water quality. These will largely be based on currently used water quality ratings used in many countries across Europe. The final activity in the task will be to look at the control costs for water pollution, and so estimate the costs of maintaining water quality within sustainable levels.
There is some risk that the data on water quality levels will be insufficient for a comprehensive analysis of for the UK, Germany and Spain. If this is the case, then representative areas within these three countries will be selected.
Last updated: 6/7/01. Webpage maintained by: hsspjm@bath.ac.uk.