Tim begins placement at Department for Energy and Climate Change

Tim Chatterton has just been awarded a prestigious placement fellowship working with the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The Fellowship is in partnership with the Research Councils Energy Programme (ESRC and EPSRC) and DECC.

The aim of the Fellowship is to provide social science input regarding the energy behaviour of individuals and communities into the policy development process in DECC in order to help enable ‘the public’ to more readily take up ‘low-carbon’ patterns of behaviour. Climate benefits of adopting low-carbon behaviour are not clearly experienced by individuals, families and other groups in the UK, as the majority of climate impacts will occur in other parts of the world, some time in the future. However, evidence suggests that many elements of low-carbon lifestyles can be seen to have direct ancillary benefits to those adopting them (such as economic or health benefits). The successful development of policies to encourage climate orientated behaviour change is likely to have to rely on being able to ‘sell’ these policies to the public on the basis of these direct ancillary benefits, in addition or alternatively to making a moral case for altruistic behaviour change.

The Air Quality Management Resource Centre has worked closely with Defra and the Devolved Administrations, and with Local Authorities in order to shape air quality policy in the UK over the last decade. This, along with Tim’s work as Chair of the UK Public Health Association’s Special Interest Group on Health and Sustainable Environments, will help him to bring a wide range of policy experience into DECC to address the issue of behaviour change.

If you are involved in any research in this area, Tim would be very interested to hear from you. Please send him a short description of your work at t.chatterton@uwe.ac.uk

Simon wins first prize for ‘best student poster’ at the second GWR Research Symposium

Jim and Simon attended the second Great Western Research Symposium 2020 Vision. I can see clearly now? held at Hewlett Packard in Bristol on 20th January. The symposium explored the contribution of the GWR research portfolio to life in 2020. Jim was invited present a plenary paper, entitled “2020 Vision. A green and pleasant land?”

The symposium was well attended by students funded by GWR, many of whom contributed a poster on their research. Congratulations to Simon, whose poster entitled “Opportunities, barriers and challenges for co-managed air pollution and carbon emissions in South West England” was judged the best in the symposium. Simon’s poster will be available soon on the GWR website. If you can’t wait until then, you can always find the poster and other outputs from his research on his research web page at http://www.uwe.ac.uk/aqm/simon.html. Go check it out!

NEW Emission Factor Toolkit, NOx to NO2 calculator, background maps and future-year projection factors

A number of changes have recently been made to the Local Air Quality Management tools available on the air quality archive website (www.airquality.co.uk). The new tools should be used for new work. If work has already been started using the old set of tools, it is not necessary to go back and repeat the work unless the local authority believes that this would be appropriate. So long as models have been appropriately verified against local measurements, the updates to the tools should not invalidate work already carried out, even though precise results would be different. The changes are as follows:

1) The Emission Factor Toolkit (EFT) has been updated to use the DfTs latest vehicle emission factors (published in 2009). This allows modellers to calculate vehicular emissions in line with the latest predictions. It is possible for users to incorporate the emissions that they calculate using the EFT into most dispersion models (but not screening tools such as DMRB).
2) The NOx to NO2 calculator has been updated. These changes take account of more recent predictions of oxidant levels across the UK and also use revised default values for primary NO2 (fNO2) (as shown within the spreadsheet).
3) The national maps of background air pollutant concentrations have been updated to take account of more recent emissions predictions and updated methods. A short report describing the principal changes between the two sets of maps is included on the website along with the maps.
4) The sector-removal tool for calculating sector-adjusted background nitrogen dioxide concentrations has been updated following changes to the background mapping methodology.
5) The future-year projection factors for roadside monitoring data contained in Box 2.1 of LAQM.TG(09) have been updated.

All of these tools can only be applied to data from the year 2008 onward. An FAQ on modelling conditions prior to 2008 will follow soon.
If local authorities require any help or clarification they should contact the Review and Assessment Helpdesk on 0117 32 83668 or aqm-review@uwe.ac.uk.