Fossil-Fuel Traffic Abatement and NO2 Urban Pollution: What Covid-19 Lockdown Predicts about the Benefits of the EU Zero Emission Vehicles Resolution

Risultato della ricerca: Working paper

Abstract

In March 2023 EU member states approved a new legislative resolution requiring all new vehicles sold to have zero CO2 emissions from 2035. This resolution has generated controversy among policymakers, stakeholders and scientists, mainly related to uncertainties regarding its ultimate effectiveness in generating an actual global reduction of pollution and CO2 emissions. However, what is uncontroversial about the shift toward zero-emission vehicular traffic is the potential to reduce air pollution – particularly in terms of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) – at the local level in the most densely populated and polluted urban areas. In these areas, reducing local air pollution is indeed a major policy goal that can benefit citizens’ quality of life and health. This paper aims at estimating the predicted impact of the zero emission vehicles resolution on local NO2 air pollution using data from Regional Environmental Agency (ARPA) measurement stations of the regions located along the Po-river basin, which represent the largest area of Europe with critically-high air pollutant values. To mimic the future scenario with zero emission vehicles, we exploit the occurrence of the Italian national Covid-19 lockdown of the first half of 2020, which provides a unique availability of data on a period of exogenous sharp abatement of fossil-fuel vehicular traffic. The causal-inference analysis exploits a novel intertemporal Statistical Matching (SM) approach that relies on Propensity Score (PS) and Mahalanobis Distance (MAHD) techniques in the context of multivariate time-series data. This approach has a number of advantages compared to empirical strategies adopted in the recently-emerging literature on the air-quality impact of covid-19 lockdowns, and it represents a viable tool for estimating at large the causal impact of public policies aimed at reducing air pollution. The estimates show that the Covid-19 lockdown policy resulted in a significant drop in daily average NO2 levels, between -50.9% and -55.4%, from a baseline average value of about 25.5 μg/m3. These results are robust to a number of sensitivity analyses and provide empirical support to the prediction that a significant abatement of local NO2 pollution is likely to be achieved in areas with low air-quality standards by adopting policies aimed at reducing fossil-fuel vehicular traffic, such as the EU 2035 zero emission resolution.
Lingua originaleInglese
Numero di pagine17
Stato di pubblicazionePubblicato - 2023

Keywords

  • Air pollution
  • NO2 abatement
  • Traffic policy
  • Covid-19 lockdown

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