Found 10359 publications. Showing page 346 of 415:
Best practices for local and regional air quality management. Version 1.
FAIRMODE is the Forum for Air Quality Modeling created for exchanging experience and results from air quality modeling in the context of the Air Quality Directives (AQD) and for promoting the use of modeling for air quality assessment and management. FAIRMODE is organized in different activities and task, called cross-cutting tasks, to which representative of Member States and experts participate. Among the different activities, one is devoted to Air Quality management practices, called cross-cutting task 5 (CT5). This report is indeed based on the last activities of the FAIRMODE Cross Cutting Task 5 (CT5), focusing, in particular, on elaborating recommendations to support local, regional and national authorities in the use of modelling for the development of air quality plans, defining on how to quantify emission changes associated to a set of measures, and quantifying their impacts in terms of concentration (using an ‘impact pathway approach’ from ‘abatement measure’ to ‘emissions’ to ‘concentrations’). This is done on one side taking advantage of the results already produced by previous FAIRMODE working groups and in coordination with existing activities under other FAIRMODE CTs. On the other side, examples of best practice policies are presented, focusing on Low emission zones: with an example on Antwerp and Copenhagen, Measures on non-exhaust traffic to reduce PM, with an application on Stockholm. How to reduce ozone concentrations, with a focus on local to global contributions. How to build an air quality plan in an integrated way, with an application on Italy. How to evaluate the socio-economic impact of measures, focusing on a case study on UK. The results show how different pollutants should be tackled differently, the importance of integration among different sectoral plans (on emissions, greenhouse gases mitigation, …) and also how other dimensions of the problem (i.e. social aspects) should be considered when building air quality plans.
Publications Office for the European Union
2022
2022
Electrification of residential heating and investment in building energy efficiency are central pillars of many national strategies to reduce carbon emissions from the built environment sector. Ireland has a strong dependence on oil use for central heating and a substantial share of homes still using solid fuels. The current national strategy calls for the retrofitting of 400,000 home heating systems with heat pumps by 2030, principally replacing oil fired heating systems. Displacing natural gas, oil and solid fuel boilers with heat pumps will have a favourable impact on climate outcomes. However, the impact on air pollutant outcomes is far more favourable when solid fuels are replaced, and the positive impact on ambient air quality is much enhanced where concentrated clusters of solid-fuel use are targeted. This research spatially analyses emissions and air pollutant concentration outcomes for both targeted and non-targeted deployments of heat pumps and shows that a focused deployment of just 3% of the national heat pump target on solid-fuel homes could offer similar progress on climate goals but with a substantial impact in terms of reducing air pollution hot spots. For the Irish residential heating season (October–March), the targeted solid fuel scenario delivers average PM2.5 concentration decreases of 20–34%. This paper shows that these targeted communities are often in areas of relative deprivation, and as such, direct support for fabric retrofitting and heat pump technology installation offers the potential to simultaneously advance climate, air and just transition policy ambitions.
2022
2022
2022
To cope with the high number of nanomaterials manufactured, it is essential to develop high-throughput methods for in vitro toxicity screening. At the same time, the issue with interference of the nanomaterial (NM) with the read-out or the reagent of the assay needs to be addressed to avoid biased results. Thus, validated label-free methods are urgently needed for hazard identification of NMs to avoid unintended adverse effects on human health. The colony forming efficiency (CFE) assay is a label- and interference-free method for quantification of cytotoxicity by cell survival and colony forming efficiency by CFE formation. The CFE has shown to be compatible with toxicity testing of NMs. Here we present an optimized protocol for a higher-throughput set up.
2022
Background
The NORMAN Association (https://www.norman-network.com/) initiated the NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE; https://www.norman-network.com/nds/SLE/) in 2015, following the NORMAN collaborative trial on non-target screening of environmental water samples by mass spectrometry. Since then, this exchange of information on chemicals that are expected to occur in the environment, along with the accompanying expert knowledge and references, has become a valuable knowledge base for “suspect screening” lists. The NORMAN-SLE now serves as a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) chemical information resource worldwide.
Results
The NORMAN-SLE contains 99 separate suspect list collections (as of May 2022) from over 70 contributors around the world, totalling over 100,000 unique substances. The substance classes include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, natural toxins, high production volume substances covered under the European REACH regulation (EC: 1272/2008), priority contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and regulatory lists from NORMAN partners. Several lists focus on transformation products (TPs) and complex features detected in the environment with various levels of provenance and structural information. Each list is available for separate download. The merged, curated collection is also available as the NORMAN Substance Database (NORMAN SusDat). Both the NORMAN-SLE and NORMAN SusDat are integrated within the NORMAN Database System (NDS). The individual NORMAN-SLE lists receive digital object identifiers (DOIs) and traceable versioning via a Zenodo community (https://zenodo.org/communities/norman-sle), with a total of > 40,000 unique views, > 50,000 unique downloads and 40 citations (May 2022). NORMAN-SLE content is progressively integrated into large open chemical databases such as PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and the US EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard/), enabling further access to these lists, along with the additional functionality and calculated properties these resources offer. PubChem has also integrated significant annotation content from the NORMAN-SLE, including a classification browser (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/classification/#hid=101).
Conclusions
The NORMAN-SLE offers a specialized service for hosting suspect screening lists of relevance for the environmental community in an open, FAIR manner that allows integration with other major chemical resources. These efforts foster the exchange of information between scientists and regulators, supporting the paradigm shift to the “one substance, one assessment” approach. New submissions are welcome via the contacts provided on the NORMAN-SLE website (https://www.norman-network.com/nds/SLE/).
2022
With the current possible presence of thousands of PFAS compounds in industrial emissions, there is an increasing need to assess the impacts of PFAS regulation of conventional PFAS on one hand and the exposure to emerging and yet unknown PFAS on the other. Today’s analytical methodologies using targeted approaches are not sufficient to determine the complete suite of PFAS present. To evaluate the presence of unknown PFAS, we investigated in this study the occurrence of an extended range of target PFAS in various species from the marine and terrestrial Norwegian environment, in relation to the extractable organic fluorine (EOF), which yields the total amount of organic fluorine. The results showed a varying presence of extractable fluorinated organics, with glaucous gull eggs, otter liver and polar bear plasma showing the highest EOF and a high abundance of PFAS as well. The targeted PFAS measurements explained 1% of the organic fluorine for moose liver as the lowest and 94% for otter liver as the highest. PFCAs like trifluoro acetic acid (TFA, reported semi-quantitatively), played a major role in explaining the organic fluorine present. Emerging PFAS as the perfluoroethylcyclohexane sulfonate (PFECHS), was found in polar bear plasma in quantifiable amounts for the first time, confirming earlier detection in arctic species far removed from emission sources. To enable a complete organic fluorine mass balance in wildlife, new approaches are needed, to uncover the presence of new emerging PFAS as cyclic- or ether PFAS together with chlorinated PFAS as well as fluorinated organic pesticides and pharmaceuticals.
2022
2022
Denne rapporten sammenstiller kunnskap om forurensningstilstanden i forvaltningsplanområdene Barentshavet, Norskehavet og Nordsjøen/Skagerrak, med hovedvekt på miljøgifter og radioaktiv forurensning. Rapporten oppsummerer resultater fra overvåkning av Overvåkingsgruppens indikatorsett, som publiseres på miljostatus.no, det vil si 43 indikatorer for forurensning og fire indikatorer for potensielt forurensende menneskelig aktivitet i havområdene. Rapporten inneholder også annen relevant kunnskap. Det er også gjort en evaluering av indikatorsettet og de ulike indikatorenes egnethet til å vurdere tilstand, utvikling og effekter på mattrygghet og miljøkvalitet.
Havforskningsinstituttet
2022
2022
2022
The aim of this project was to collect, integrate and analyse observations of climate-relevant aerosol parameters (aerosol optical depth (AOD), Ångstrøm exponent (AE), black carbon (BC)) in and around Svalbard. These observations have been performed at different places and with different instrument types, the analysis procedures of which follow different protocols. Annual merged datasets of AOD, AE and BC have been provided to the SIOS Data Management System and are now available for network-wide use in, e.g., Arctic climate and pollution studies. The analysis of the 2002-2020 data have confirmed earlier results showing a good correlation between measurements in Ny-Ålesund and Hornsund, but not a high degree of short-term agreement due to aerosol variability arising from geographical locations and local conditions. There is also a clear link between the columnar AOD/AE-measurements and in-situ aerosol measurements at Gruvebadet Observatory, while a comparison of in-situ measurements at Gruvebadet and Zeppelin Observatory shows deviations varying with season.
NILU
2022
2022
2022
Epidemiological studies have increasingly shown that ambient air pollution is not only associated with mortality but also with the occurrence of a number of long and short-term diseases. Further, the Global Burden of Disease study clearly indicated, that e. g. particulate matter pollution is also associated with a considerable burden of disease related to morbidity effects.
In addition to the most recent EEA’s health risk assessments, this report estimates the morbidity related health burden associated with exposure to the same three key air pollutants: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3). Years lived with disability (YLDs) or attributable hospitalisation cases are assessed for the year 2019 for numerous European countries, depending on the respective data availability. Besides, the methodological approach as well as reviews on evidence-based health outcomes, health data and concentration-response functions are provided.
For the ten considered risk-outcome pairs, the results showed the highest morbidity related burden of disease in Europe for PM2.5 associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with 51.6 YLDs per 100 000 inhabitants ≥25 years. For NO2 the highest morbidity burden resulted from diabetes mellitus (DM) with 54.6 YLDs per 100 000 inhabitants ≥35 years. For short-term O3 exposure hospital admissions due to respiratory diseases were estimated at 18 attributable cases per 100 000 inhabitants ≥65 years.
In addition to the estimates, the report contains suggestions for further sensitivity analyses. These would allow a better assessment of the effects resulting from different input data on the results.
The estimations presented in this report are the first of its kind that are carried out for a wide range of morbidity health outcomes associated with different outdoor air pollutants in Europe, using a consistent methodology and data from European health databases.
ETC/HE
2022