Designing a scenario-modelling tool to inform policy on air pollutant emissions

Designing a scenario-modelling tool to inform policy on air pollutant emissions

Ricardo’s experts develop a modelling tool to support UK Government decision makers in the development of policy to meet obligations under the European Commission’s National Emission Ceilings Directive and UK Clean Air Strategy targets.

‘The diverse skills of our team enabled us to create a scientifically robust, intuitive and technologically secure evidence platform for Defra to investigate the future impacts of policies and technologies on air quality. The tool will give policy makers more confidence that the decisions they make will reduce emissions and have a positive impact on the health and quality of life of the UK population.’ Rachel Yardley, Air Quality & Environment, Ricardo

Challenge

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is responsible for meeting the UK’s challenging targets for reducing pollutant emissions under the National Emission Ceilings Regulations. It also has ambitious plans to tackle a wide range of air pollution sources set out in the UK’s Clean Air Strategy. Ricardo has developed a scenario modelling tool (SMT) that enables policy makers at Defra to investigate the impact of different emission reduction policy interventions.
The tool enables policy makers to quickly model the effects of different measures on emissions through to 2050. The SMT is fully customisable, enabling users to explore the impact of different underpinning assumptions such as technology uptake rates and temporal emissions profiles. It is a powerful tool for informing policy development at national and local scales, supporting delivery of objectives set out in the Clean Air Strategy and the National Air Pollution Control Plan.

Approach

Developing the SMT has involved extensive consultation, rigorous testing and effective collaboration of a large project team with diverse expertise. 
The Ricardo team is working closely with Defra and other stakeholders to ensure the SMT meets the needs of future users – a tool that is easy to use, flexible and delivers data outputs in a format that can be readily used and understood by policy makers, scientists, and modellers.
The SMT uses powerful, cloud-based, open-source technologies with all calculations and data processing performed server-side, which eliminates any issues relating to compatibility with an end-user’s machine and simplifies ongoing support requirements.
Functionality in the SMT includes:

• User dashboard setting out source apportioned emissions for the scenario.
• Interactive visualisations of emissions over time in a graphical format
• Interactive spatial distribution of emissions
• Ability to select the baseline year.
• Over 300 pre-defined policy measures developed by sector experts to represent current policy landscapes and available technologies
• Interactions between measures and cross sector impacts (e.g. electrification reducing vehicle emissions, but potentially increasing power station emissions).
• Prioritisation of measures.
• Ability to create custom measures from scratch, including the addition of new sources.
• Cost-benefit analysis of measures and marginal abatement cost curves.

Results

The SMT enables users to:

• Investigate the impact of different emission reduction policies and measures on key air pollutant emissions from waste, energy, transport, industrial processes and agricuture.
• Rapidly model the effects of one or several different measures on emissions from a range of sectors through to 2050.
• Explore an unlimited number of custom scenarios to test assumptions regarding uptake rates, temporal profiles and numerous other variables.
• Generate robust evidence that can be used to inform policy development at national and local scales.

With flexibility to update the underlying baseline dataset and create new and detailed scenarios, the SMT can be used by policy makers for many years to come.