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Common Information to European Air (CITEAIR II)
Start date: Sep 30, 2008, End date: Sep 29, 2011 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The majority of European citizens live in an urban environment and share the same space for all of their activities. Urban agglomerations are the drivers of the European economy and attract investment and jobs. Their further development depends on a sustainable urban environment in general and urban mobility options in particular. Cities and regions are facing risks such as exposure to high air pollution and emerging impacts from climate change. Given the difficulty to improve the urban environment and reduce the CO2 emissions, there is ample scope for collaboration, exchange of experiences, jointly formulate policies and transferable measures in spite of past and ongoing actions. The European Union is continuously working in this field (e.g. 6th Environmental Action Plan, draft Green Paper “Towards a new call levelsulture for urban mobility” and the Green Paper “Adapting to climate change in Europe”). These supra-national initiatives need to be complemented and implemented on alllevels, particularly at the urban/regional scale. This is where CITEAIR II plays a role. Measures to mitigate air pollution and climate change constitute a tremendous challenge all planning authorities are faced with and many decisions directly or indirectly influencing the emissions are taken at the local and regional level. This is also where detailed knowledge is available and behavioural change is part of the solutions it also depends on public awareness of the local situation. Therefore local policy developments tend to respond faster to new challenges than supranational policy. If implemented in a concerted way they can have a substantial impact. The aim of CITEAIR II is “To jointly identify, test and transfer a set of good practices through the exchange of experiences and to improve the effectiveness of regional development policies in the area of air quality protection, sustainable transport and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions"". Based on a previous Project, CITEAIR IIinnovates. It involves additional partners thus ensuring a better coverage. It built exchange of experience on other topics, develops fresh contents leading to further good practices and their transfer. It will deliver and transfer the following good practices: a) A sustainable traffic indicator to characterise the urban traffic impact, b) a dedicated urban air quality forecast that meets the different needs of European local authorities and c) emission inventory methodology integrating greenhouse gases as a tool to evaluate mitigation measures. Furthermore, CITEAIR II will enhance comparability across Europe and public information by adding these good practices to the existing web service www.airqualitynow.eu. This comparisons also facilitates the exchange of experiences and mutual learning. Through the involvement of local authorities beyond the project partnership and intense international cooperation, CITEAIR II intend to have an impact on the development of local policies. Achievements: The CITEAIR II project has reached its end of lifetime. Based on a previous project, CITEAIR II innovates and had the objectives to “jointly identify, test and transfer a set of good practices through the exchange of experiences and to improve the effectiveness of regional development policies in the area of air quality protection, sustainable transport and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)“. The project has made very good progress and has reached all its goals. The main activities focussed three points: a good practices guidebook on integrated emission inventories combining pollutants- and GHG emissions, the development of a mobility indicator and an air quality forecast. The project has identified 13 good practices in total.The final version of the guidebook on integrated emission inventories has been prepared, highlighting in particular the issues linked with coupling bottom up and top down approaches, the specificities of the integration of GHGs and tools designed to manage emission inventories and assess scenarios. After some definition work the concept of a mobility indicator has been finalized based on existing approaches. It comprises list of eleven indicators to describe the mobility status and the relative impact on the citizen and the environment. The applicability of the methodology and the indicators has been tested with real-life traffic data from Rome, Paris and Maribor. A guidebook has been prepared to describe those indicators, provide explanation on how to calculate them and present the results of the application.Finally, the third product that was developed under the CITEAIR II project is an air quality forecast for the Common Air Quality Index (CAQI) The methodology set up for the forecast is based on three levels of complexity according to the data available from the cities. Level one forecast, designed to be accessible for all cities, has been applied to Rotterdam, Seville, Gdansk, Gdynia, Tczew and Sopot. Level 3 forecast is applied to Marseille. The data format definition and exhaustive data collection took place during the two first periods. During the previous periods, statistical analysis has been undertaken with data from several cities, these exercises proved the robustness of the method. The methodology and the results of the validation are described in the final version of the guidebook on air quality forecast.The work to update the CITEAIR Air Quality Index CAQI to accommodate the pollutant PM2.5 has been completed. The new calculation grid of the CAQI is applied on www.airqualitynow.eu and the cities are asked to provide PM2.5 data In addition, the information of the public on the air quality in an easy understandable and comparable way was further facilitated by the updates on www.airqualitynow.eu. The cities website has grown up to 111 cities delivering their air quality data. This website is now available in 11 European languages. While the work on the products was running, the dissemination and communication activities were smoothly going on. It included an Air Quality Conference in Paris in June 2009 and a workshop in June 2010 in Ljubljana. The final conference has been held on the 24th June 2011 in Rome. The project has been promoted on several conferences and workshops and has disseminated news via its Facebook and Twitter channels.

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