Transport Emissions

Department of Energy of Philippines statistics reveal that from 2000 to 2010, the road transport fuel consumption and corresponding CO2 emissions have grown modestly with an annual growth rate of 0.5%. This modest growth is in contrast to the rapid increase in vehicle numbers, economic activity and in absence of implementation of comprehensive sustainable transport policies and options. The main objective of this research is to correlate official fuel consumption data (i.e. top-down) with bottom up quantifications and provide relevant policy recommendations. Based on the assessment of transport demand variables and review of policies and strategies, fuel consumption in transport sector was found to be growing at a much faster rate when compared to official estimates. Use of official data on fuel consumption in road transport sector may lead to serious errors. This has huge implications on policies and investments.

The drastic reduction in economic activities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic creates a unique and timely opportunity to examine the environmental impacts of human activity. In several countries, the aviation sector was dramatically affected by the travel restrictions, resulting in a change of trip demand and in a drop of fuel consumption. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to the impact of the pandemic on air travel demand, one of the fastest-growing sources of emissions globally. This paper estimates the impact of the COVID-19 on air travel demand and emissions in Brazil, the largest aviation market in Latin America. Combining detailed flight data with daily number of passengers and fuel consumption and data on combustion emission factors, we estimate CO2 emissions of domestic flights in Brazil. A Bayesian structural time-series model was used to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on daily trends of air travel demand and emissions. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a reduction of 68% on national passengers and 62% in total CO2 emissions compared to what would have occurred if the pandemic had not happened. It avoided a total of approximately 4.6 megatons of CO2 between March and December 2020 in Brazil, the equivalent of one year of domestic flight emissions in France. Despite such a sharp drop in commercial aviation, passenger demand recovered to 64.2% of pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020. CO2 emissions had a 52.6% reduction in 2020 and the emissions per capita increased after the COVID-19 outbreak. Although the precise impact of the COVID-19 on this figure is not yet fully understood, the fast recovery in domestic flights by December 2020 indicates that the emissions could soon return to pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating the challenges of reducing emissions in the aviation sector in the short term.

For the past few years special attention has been given to harmful road transport emissions, nitrogen oxides (NOX) and particulate matter (PM). Exposure to increased concentrations of NOX and PM emissions is known to cause respiratory ailments, heart diseases, stroke and can be the cause of premature death (Guttikunda and Goel, 2013; Li et al., 2017; Stockfelt et al., 2017). The time series results of real driving emission measurements have shown a significant difference in NOX emissions of diesel cars compared to the type approval limit values. However, this does not apply to petrol cars (Chen and Borken-Kleefeld, 2014). Remote sensing measurements indicate that NOX emissions from Euro 5 petrol cars are about a factor of 20 lower than Euro 0 cars. However, there has not been a significant change in NOX emission reduction for diesel cars from Euro 0 to Euro 5 (Carslaw and Rhys-Tyler, 2013). Particulate matter emissions are rising in many of the world's populated cities and excee...

It has been shown that the location of schools near heavily trafficked roads can have detrimental effects on the health of children attending those schools. It is therefore desirable to screen both existing school locations and potential new school sites to assess either the need for remedial measures or suitability for the intended use. Current screening tools and public guidance on school siting are either too coarse in their spatial resolution for assessing individual sites or are highly resource intensive in their execution (e.g., through dispersion modeling). We propose a new method to help bridge the gap between these two approaches. Using this method, we also examine the public K-12 schools in the Sacramento Area Council of Governments Region, California (USA) from an environmental justice perspective. We find that PM2.5 emissions from road traffic affecting a school site are significantly positively correlated with the following metrics: percent share of Black, Hispanic and multi-ethnic students, percent share of students eligible for subsidized meals. The emissions metric correlates negatively with the schools’ Academic Performance Index, the share of White students and average parental education levels. Our PM2.5 metric also correlates with the traffic related, census tract level screening indicators from the California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool and the tool’s tract level rate of asthma related emergency department visits.