The impact of ship emissions on air quality and human health in the Gothenburg area – Part II: Scenarios for 2040

Abstract

Abstract. Shipping is an important source of air pollutants, from the global to the local scale. Ships are emitting substantial amounts of sulphur dioxides, nitrogen dioxides and particulate matter in the vicinity of coasts, threatening the health of the coastal population, especially in harbour cities. Reductions of emissions due to shipping have been targeted by several regulations. Nevertheless, effects of these regulations come into force with temporal delays, global ship traffic is expected to grow in the future, and other land-based anthropogenic emissions might decrease. Thus, it is necessary to investigate combined impacts to identify the impact of shipping activities on air quality, population exposure and health-effects in the future. We investigated the future effect of shipping emissions on air quality and related health effects considering different scenarios of the development of shipping under current regional trends of economic growth and already decided regulations in the Gothenburg urban area in 2040. Additionally, we investigated the impact of a large-scale implementation of shore electricity in the port of Gothenburg. For this purpose, we established a one-way nested chemistry transport modelling (CTM) system from the global to the urban scale, to calculate pollutant concentrations, population weighted concentrations and health-effects related to NO2, PM2.5 and O3. The simulated concentrations of NO2 and PM2.5 in future scenarios for the year 2040 are in general very low with up to 4 ppb for NO2 and up to 3.5 µg/m3 PM2.5 in the urban areas which are not close to the port area. From 2012 the simulated overall exposure to PM2.5 decreased by approximately 30 % in simulated future scenarios, for NO2 the decrease was over 60 %. The simulated concentrations of O3 increased from year 2012 to 2040 by about 20 %. In general, the contributions of local shipping emissions in 2040 focus on the harbour area but to some extent also influence the rest of the city domain. The simulated impact of wide use of shore-site electricity for shipping in 2040 shows reductions for NO2 in the port with up to 30 %, while increasing O3 of up to 3 %. Implementation of on-shore electricity for ships at berth leads to additional local reduction potentials of up to 3 % for PM2.5 and 12 % for SO2 in the port area. All future scenarios show substantial decreases in population weighted exposure and health-effect impacts.

The impact of ship emissions on air quality and human health in the Gothenburg area – Part 1: 2012 emissions

“…Jonson et al (2019) also compared the modelled concentrations with background measurements from the station Råö, situated 20 km south of the city, and found a model underestimation of 0.7 ppb for the annual mean. The concentration levels of PM 2.5 found in this study were lower than in Segersson et al (2017) and Repka et al (2019), but they agree reasonably well with Jonson et al (2015Jonson et al ( , 2019. Segersson et al (2017) addressed the health effects of PM 2.5 , PM 10 and black carbon in three Swedish cities, among them Gothenburg, using the Gaussian model SIMAIR.…”

“…Segersson et al (2017) show annual mean background PM 2.5 concentrations for the year 2011 of about 5 µg m −3 for Gothenburg, reaching concentrations of >8 µg m −3 in polluted parts of the city. An annual mean concentration map presented in Repka et al (2019) for the year 2016 shows similar concentration levels with background concentrations of about 6 µg m −3 and maximum concentrations of > 8 µg m −3 . Both studies used PM 10 monitoring data at the urban background station Fem- Figure 12.…”

“…Furthermore, the modelled PM concentrations used as the boundary conditions in this study showed average underestimates of PM 2.5 by 60 % and 17 % in the summer and annually, respectively (Karl et al, 2019a). Two studies addressing impacts of shipping on air pollution in Gothenburg (Segersson et al, 2017;Repka et al, 2019) assessed the total concentration levels and contribution of shipping to them; however, none of them are calculated for the year 2012 assessed in this study. Segersson et al (2017) show annual mean background PM 2.5 concentrations for the year 2011 of about 5 µg m −3 for Gothenburg, reaching concentrations of >8 µg m −3 in polluted parts of the city.…”

Advances in air quality research – current and emerging challenges

“…Matthias et al, 2010;Jonson et al, 2015;Aulinger et al, 2016;Karl et al, 2019a;Kukkonen et al, 2018Kukkonen et al, , 2020a. More recent studies focus on the harbour and city scale, where relative contributions from ships to NO 2 concentrations may be even higher (Ramacher et al, 2019(Ramacher et al, , 2020. Effects of in-plume chemistry, e.g.…”

Advances in Air Quality Research – Current and Emerging Challenges

“…Matthias et al, 2010, Jonson et al, 2015, Karl et al, 2019a, Kukkonen et al, 2018. More recent studies focus on the harbour and city scale, where relative contributions from ships to NO2 concentrations may be even higher (Ramacher et al, 2019, Tang et al, 2020. Effects of in-plume chemistry, e.g., regarding the NOx removal and secondary aerosol formation, are not sufficiently well considered in larger scale dispersion models (e.g., Prank et al, 2016).…”