Garbage in, gospel out? – Air quality assessment in the UK planning system

Abstract

The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.

Assessing air-quality impacts in planning decisions in England: should we focus more on health?

“…Much development, especially on urban fringes or in rural areas will not have local air quality monitoring. Without actual monitoring reliance on extrapolated levels of pollutants based on complex modelling may mean decisions are based on inaccurate data, especially from diffusion tubes and/or annualised data (Malley et al 2018, Mills andPeckham 2019). The lack of local short-term exposure data is a particular problem given the evidence on adverse health impacts from short-term exposure to NO 2 , O 3 and PM (WHO 2013, Liu et al 2019.…”

“…DEFRA provides a number of modelling tools for calculating emissions and damage cost estimates to air quality impacts. However, application of these models relies on the availability of air quality data which is not always available leading to potentially different interpretations of air quality impacts (Mills and Peckham 2019). There is also a range of professional body guidance from the Royal Institute of Town Planning, IAQM and EPUK.…”

Annual NO2 as a Predictor of Hourly NO2 Variability: Do Defra UK’s Heuristics Make Sense?

“…Future values are estimated by a complicated modeling process which we have previously shown to be flawed on a number of significant fronts [10] and like any modeling process, the outputs are only as good as the inputs. In the case of air quality modeling, it is typical for a developer to calibrate their model against air quality data obtained from the relevant local authority.…”

“…Since the dominant source of air pollution in UK urban areas is traffic [11], modeling is performed by computationally dispersing pollutants from line sources that represent roads and the outputs are calibrated against a baseline year for which actual data is available. Future vehicular emissions estimates and other factors are used to predict future values of pollutants as an extrapolation from the baseline model (see [10] for a detailed explanation of the modeling process).…”