Supporting Local Municipalities in Poland and Hungary

The LIFE Programme is the EU’s funding instrument for actions to improve the quality of the environment. One of its funding programmes provides funding for large scale Strategic Integrated Projects (SIPs) that are aimed at the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of EU environmental policy.

VITO is providing air quality emissions and modelling tools in a capacity building format within two of the most prominent SIPs that are focussing on air quality policy and management in central Europe: LIFE IP Małopolska “Implementation of Air Quality Plan for Małopolska Region” situated in southern Poland and LIFE HUNGAIRY which aims at supporting 10 municipalities in implementing their air quality plans.

In LIFE IP Malopolska VITO collaborated with the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute to set-up a transboundary emissions and air quality modelling system for the highly polluted hotspot area covering southern Poland and parts of the Czech Republic and the Slovak republic. xxx) The aim, to allow the regions to determine the impact on air quality, of proposed mitigation measures to reduce the elevated residential emissions (especially harmful PM & BaP). All regions prepared two scenarios for 2023, based on the reference year 2015: a business as usual (BAU) and the most optimistic scenarios where all proposed plans would proceed.

VITO coordinated the task and used their RIO model to prepare the reference year air pollutant maps which nicely shown the variation in PM concentrations across the four regions, highlighting the significant hotspots and exceedences across most of Malopolska and Silesia (Krakow and Katowice agglomerations; Jastrzębie Zdrój city) . Compared to the optimistic scenario simulations run by the partners, it was found that most of the measures proposed to reduce emissions from residential heating sources will lead to sufficient reductions in the PM concentration in the whole transboundary region if meteorological conditions are like 2015.

For the Municipality of Krakow, Transport System Division, VITO developed a web based traffic emissions and air quality modelling tool which they use to assess the impact of their transport plans on the air quality in Krakow and the surroundings Ensuring that the quality of air in Krakow is given a high priority when evaluating which transport management plans are best applied.

Building upon the software tool built for Krakow, VITO is developing a emissions and air quality modelling tool (ATMO-Plan Hungairy) that can be used by the eco-managers in the Hungarian LIFE project to assess measures that are proposed to tackle traffic and residential heating emission sources. VITO is collaborating closely with the Hungarian Meteorological Service, who are supplying the emissions and meteorological data, and who will ensure continuity of the tool going forward.

To guarantee this, VITO are also transferring other air quality modelling tools that can be used to support the air quality team in renewing the air quality background data used in the tool, as well as emissions data for performing the scenarios. In that, VITO has set-up a spatial emissions gridding tool to support their emissions team in preparing gridded emissions in line with CLRTAP, and to improve preparation of the spatial emissions used in their air quality models for supporting air quality policy at a national level.