Evaluating climate mitigation and air quality synergies and trade-offs throughout the Covenant of Mayors initiative

Tackling Climate Change is a priority for the European Union, who has set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions progressively up to 2050. In 2008, acknowledging the role of local authorities, the European Commission (EC) launched the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative to endorse their efforts in the implementation of sustainable energy and climate policies. The JRC plays a central role in the CoM ecosystem, providing the methodological guidelines that enable cities to process their own GHG emission data. Furthermore, the JRC provides scientific supervision and makes comprehensive GHG datasets available to the whole CoM community (Baldi et al., 2022).

Since 2018, in the frame of its support to the EU Covenant of Mayor (CoM) initiative, the JRC is bringing to the attention of the city administrators the importance of tuning climate change mitigation and air quality. For this goal, in cooperation with the CoM stakeholders we have developed a specific tool aimed at allowing the CoM signatories to evaluate the consequences of their mitigation policies on the air pollutants emissions taking place in their territory.

 

The tool was developed in two steps: (1) in the first part of the research project, a pilot version of the tool has been developed based on the methodology reported in two previous studies, Monforti-Ferrario et al. (2018) and Peduzzi et al. (2020); (2) after setting up the tool, the pilot tool has been made available to a group of of CoM signatories. Their comments and feedbacks  have been through a questionnaire and showed how the tool i especially useful for small and middle-sized signatories.

As reported in Peduzzi et al. (2020) the tool is based on the comparison between the Baseline Emission Inventory (BEI) and the successive Monitoring Emission Inventories (MEI) the signatories need to submit to comply with CoM requirements.The changes in energy consumption (by sector and carrier) between BEI and MEI were translated into the corresponding changes in air pollutant emissions by means of estimated emission factors.

 

Updated data on the actual use of the tool and feedback from users and practitioners will be provided and discussed. We will complete the presentation with reflections and suggestions for local authorities to practically improve the co-designing of climate and air pollution policies based on the experience collected throughout the CoM initiative.

 

 

References

Baldi et al., (2022): GCoM - MyCovenant, 2021, Second release. European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) [Dataset] PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/9cefa6ca-1391-4bcb-a9c8-46e029cf99bb

Monforti-Ferrario et al, 2018, The impact on air quality of energy saving measures in the major cities signatories of the Covenant of Mayors initiative. Environmental International, 118, 222-234

Peduzzi  et al, 2020, Impacts of a climate change initiative on air pollutant emissions: Insights from the Covenant of Mayors, Environment International, Volume 145,  106029