Plenary Lecture 2

Air Quality in urban areas and other hot spots, where transport emissions induce a large impact on human exposure, remains an environmental problem of high complexity attracting strong public interest. The European Commission has proposed revising the Ambient Air Quality Directive to improve Europe’s air quality. New suggested measures include tightening air quality limit values in alignment with WHO levels and improved monitoring of currently unregulated and emerging pollutants. The monitoring of emerging air quality parameters, such as ultrafine particles (UFP) and Black Carbon (BC), is beneficial in terms of gaining a better understanding of air pollution. Supporting and complementing the regular observation networks could underpin the efforts of governments and civil society to comply with the sought SDGs for sustainable cities and communities. Despite the strict Emission Standards, “real world” emissions from transport sources is accepted as a term, indicating a status of only partial success of current fossil fuel emission control, while the high significance of non-exhaust emissions is now recognized. The MI-TRAP project aims to improve the currently available Tools and services for air pollution mitigation from transport sources through a multi-dimensional approach. The project will develop and  provide a suite of beyond the state of the art innovative monitoring Instrumentation package, data analysis tools to track emitted pollutants, enable systematic traffic management and evaluate the effectiveness of legislation and control measures. The project will be implemented in ten cities across Europe, aiming to characterize the footprint of transport emission sources and assess their impact on air quality and human health. MI-TRAP will provide the methodologies for collecting and utilizing data for unregulated and emerging transport related air pollutants, including solid particle number (sPN) and bare BC (bBC) (to bridge the gap between lab and real-world conditions), UFPs and number size distributions, non-refractory organics and inorganics, trace and major elements, exhaust gasses, and noise. These data will be complemented with real-time traffic metrics i.e. traffic density and fleet composition. Using novel analytical