APPRAISAL · Air Pollution Policies foR Assesement of Integrated Strategies At regional and Local scales

Air quality in Europe is still facing a continued wide-spread of exceedances, particularly regarding PM, NOx and O3. The 2008 Air Quality Directive requests Member States (MS) to design local and regional plans and assess their impacts on air quality and human health. MS have therefore developed and applied a wide range of modeling methods to cope with these obligations. Today, with the revision of the EU air quality policy pending, there is the need to consolidate and assess the research results in the field and to make them accessible to policy makers. This is the main aim of APPRAISAL project, split in the following objectives:-Undertake on overall review of the methodologies used in different countries, from the simple (scenario analysis) to the more comprehensive (cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness analysis). This would include evaluating top-down and bottom-up approaches to systematically analyze their strengths and weaknesses and to identify key areas to be addressed by further research. The result would be captured in a readily updatable, user friendly relational data base.-Design an integrated assessment (IA) modeling framework where existing components are efficiently inter-connected, produce guidelines describing the key components of best practices. A number of test cases will be explored to confirm the robustness of the guidelines in practice.-Communicate with key stake-holders and in particular to policy-makers the state-of-the-art scientific knowledge on emission abatement assessment.APPRAISAL includes 15 highly experienced groups working on both air quality and health impacts assessment. Partners come from all over Europe to guarantee the review process representativeness. A group of stakeholders will closely be connected to the Consortium to ensure a direct line of communication with key policy makers. APPRAISAL will contribute to improved knowledge on regional and local IA methodologies and will support the revision of EU air quality policies.