Jo chairs session at Air Pollution 2013

Jo chaired the Monitoring and Measuring session at the Air Pollution 2013 conference in Siena last week.  The session included a keynote address from Dr Paulo Zannetti and two invited presentations from Professor Dr Olf Herbarth and Dr Myrium Lopes and an additional presentation from Mr Shaikh Abdullah.

Jo presents at Air Pollution XXI

Jo presented a paper on 'Is Local Air Quality Management a Successful Strategy in Achieving Selected EU Limit Values' at the 21st Air Pollution conference in Siena last Wednesday. The paper appeared in the 'Regional Studies' session. The abstract submitted  follows:

'Is Local Air Quality Management a Successful Strategy in Achieving Selected EU Limit Values'
For the past 15 years, local air quality management in the UK has relied on the implementation of air quality action plans to allow local authorities to work towards remediating breaches of the national air quality objectives, primarily due to road traffic. Failure of national policies to sufficiently reduce road traffic emissions has added to the importance of local air quality action plans to help the UK government to meet EU limit values for NO₂ and PM₁₀. Local authorities are required to report measured pollutant concentrations and progress on their action plans annually, but, to date, there have been no studies published to determine whether, locally or collectively, action plans are effectively implemented and what, if any, effect they are having on air quality.  This paper provides a synoptic and time-series approach to assess the effectiveness of local air quality action planning using local authority case studies to demonstrate.

Report Back from ECEEE Summer Study

Tim had a busy time at last week’s Summer Study held by the European Council for and Energy Efficient Economy.  He ran workshops during the week.  The first on the EPSRC funded MOT (Motoring and vehicle Ownership Trends in the UK) Project and dealt with “Linking energy use from private transport and domestic use:  The challenges and opportunities of ‘Big Data’”.  The second workshop, run with Charlie Wilson from UEA,  was  on his current ESRC Follow On Fund (Characterising Energy Behaviours – or “When is a behaviour not (just) a behaviour?”).  

 

Tim also presented a paper on his ‘4 Dimensions of Behaviour’ framework from his Follow-On Fund project, which was described by ECEEE old-timer and esteemed energy anthropologist from Oslo University as “representing the future of social science engagement around energy”.