Why this Database?

The European Commission is currently reviewing the Air Quality legislation aiming to update health and environmental standards, to establish new actions to reduce emissions for meeting interim objectives and to take into consideration costs and benefits of these actions. Understanding the reasons for the current levels of air quality non-compliance is an essential part of this reviewing process, as well as evaluating available and commonly used tools to assess and predict the air quality. In this context the identification of pollutant sources is an important step in order to provide the necessary inputs for the development of emission reduction strategies. Moreover there is a need for more ‘integrated’ approaches, which bring together air quality and health aspects in the current assessment methodologies of air quality plans.

APPRAISAL is an FP7 project on Integrated Assessment of air pollution. Its main objective is to consolidate knowledge and common practices on air pollution assessment throughout Europe and to make them accessible to the policy makers at local and regional level. In this scope, the project team is reviewing and consolidating methodologies to address and assess the impact of local and regional air quality plans and their health implications.

This database allows collecting, in a common format, information on the different assessment methodologies used in European Member States with the purpose to identify the strengths and weaknesses in current practices and provide guidelines to users, to help in the assessment of the impact of local/regional air quality plans. APPRAISAL outcomes will support the revision of air quality legislation.

Why my participation is important?

An Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) framework and guidelines will be outlined based on the information contained in the database. The IAM framework and the guidelines will only be useful if they reflect the whole range of methodologies applied in the different member states. The more information included in the database the more useful the IAM and the guidelines become to all potential users. The resulting documents from the analysis of the database will support the revision of the EU air quality policies.