Local air quality management and climate change : tools for joined up policy

All tiers of UK Government are required to include a range of environmental objectives in developing land use and transportation plans. The current trend towards regionalisation of governance brings with it uncertainty and debate. Part of this debate must include determination of the optimum scale for implementing land use and transportation plans to incorporate environmental objectives. This thesis is the result of developing tools to assist in this debate, using the environmental objectives relating to local air quality management and global climate change. A major outcome of this research is the development of robust techniques and tools for the estimation of atmospheric emissions and subsequent air quality impact from land use, including industry, and transportation activities. An extensive number of evaluation techniques have been used to verify the robustness of these tools. These tools have been applied to a geographically diverse part of the UK representing a sub-regional level of governance and have been demonstrated to be applicable at the regional scale. The tools have been used to provide a spatially detailed and source specific profile of emissions of key pollutants over a period from 1990 to 2020 allowing for the consideration of devolving the climate change objectives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the national to local scale. There is a balance between source size and the extent of geographical area (scale of governance) to ensure meaningful emission reduction measures can be implemented equitably. The tools have also been used to test the impact on local air quality of reducing emissions through assessment of a number of land use and transportation scenarios. The results indicate meeting climate change objectives will deliver more in terms of local air quality management than vice versa. There is expected to be a future limit to local air quality management in terms of reducing emissions and a need to reduce population exposure through land use planning. The issue of source scale may be overcome by adopting off setting policies. The results of this research suggest the inclusion of local air quality management and climate change objectives in land use and transportation planning could be achieved at the regional or sub-regional scale, rather than local (district) scale of governance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo