Action 24007 - Air, Climate and Human Interactions (AIRCLIM)

Air: also your business?

Air pollution and climate change are linked in many ways and can be beneficially addressed by common policies.
The overall environmental effectiveness of integrated policies needs to be tackled: Immediate investments in low-carbon and carbon-free energy technologies is clearly the long term solution (> 100 years) for both air pollution and climate, but the short term implications (< 30 years), for climate in particular, still need to be carefully examined. For example, the present focus of air pollution policy on reducing the mass concentration of aerosols (PM10, PM2.5), while good for human health, may lead to increased global warming in the short term. An emerging issue is the potential for mitigating short-term global warming by reducing specific shorter lived warming agents, notably black carbon, tropospheric ozone and methane. The cost and environmental effectiveness of such complementary policies still need to be quantified and this requires improved understanding of the impacts of air pollutants on both climate and human health. As most of the emission reductions will take place at the urban scale, the exchange of pollutants from urban-to-regional-to-global scales needs to be better addressed in order to quantify the effectiveness of local emission control strategies for regional and global air pollution and climate.

The AIRCLIM Action focuses on EU and global air pollutant and greenhouse gas emission reduction polices and their effects on climate change and air pollution. The Action supports the Commission and Member States in the implementation of the Air Quality Directive (AQD), by harmonising assessment methodologies through modelling and monitoring exercises. It manages centralised activities such as the European Reference Laboratory for Air Pollution (ERLAP) and ENSEMBLE (a system for forecasting medium and long range atmospheric dispersion), and operates through its networks with Member States: AQUILA (Network of Air Quality Reference Laboratories) for monitoring and FAIRMODE (Forum for Air Quality Modelling in Europe) for modelling. With its sister action BIOCLIM, the Action continues to consolidate scientific knowledge of those parts of the Earth System in order to provide support for making more effective and integrated air pollution and climate change policies. One of the main activities of the Action is the running of the Atmosphere/ Biosphere/Climate – Integrated Station on the Ispra site (ABC-IS is composed of an EMEP air quality monitoring station and a forest greenhouse gas (GHG) flux tower and a GHG measurement mast) to monitor and evaluate the importance of feedbacks in the Earth System that can amplify or dampen the expected effects of air pollution and climate change policies.

Specific objectives of the Action

• To develop and harmonise monitoring and modelling methodologies to support the Commission and Member States in the implementation of the Air Quality Directive and for the revision of the Thematic Strategy for Air Pollution.

• To support long term EU and global air pollution and greenhouse gas monitoring, in particular through the EMEP network and activities within the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) context.

• To develop coherent greenhouse gas and air pollutant emission inventories and projections in synergy with the EU Energy and Climate Package.

• To acquire and consolidate scientific knowledge of those parts of the Earth System (including human activities) that underpin more effective and integrated air pollution and climate change policies.

The AIRCLIM Action has extensive experience in emission inventories, measuring and modelling air pollution and related impacts.

Modelling: The Action uses several models and tools to analyse chemistry and transport of air pollution, as TM5, Chimere, ECHAM, and the integrated assessment tools RIAT and FASST, and in collaboration with its sister action BIOCLIM the climate model CLM. A vast experience in model intercomparisons has been obtained within ETEX, CityDelta, EuroDelta, ENSEMBLE, HTAP and AQMEII.

Measurements: The Action runs the European Reference Laboratory for Air Pollution (ERLAP), organizing EU harmonization programmes and developing measurement methods, and the WMO-GAW EMEP super site, which measures gas and aerosol components. Since 2005, the Action measures ozone and aerosol particles in regular campaigns on the Mediterranean Sea.

The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) provides global past and present day anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants by country and on spatial grid (in collaboration with Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency_PBL).

Main customers

- DG Environment
- DG Climate Action
- DG Energy
- United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
- Co-operative programme for monitoring and evaluation of the long range transmission of air pollutants in Europe (EMEP)
- Task Force Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TFHTAP)
- Task Force Measurements and Modelling (TFMM)
- Task Force Integrated Assessment Modelling (TFIAM)
- Task Force Emissions Inventories and Projections (TFEIP)
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
- World Health Organisation (WHO)
- European Committee for Standardisation (CEN)
- International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC)
- European Environment Agency (EEA)
- US Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA)
- Air Quality Laboratories of the Member States and Associated Countries

EU Legislation and Documents supported by this Action

- EU climate change policy
- EU transboundary air pollution policy
- Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC
- Directive relating to arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ambient air 2004/107/EC
- Revision of the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution COM/2005/446

Past activities

- Workshop REMOTE SENSING OF AIR POLLUTION
- Natural Sources of PM