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The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee have published ‘The Airports Commission Report Follow-up: Carbon Emissions, Air Quality and Noise’.
Philippa Oldham, Head of Transport at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said:
“This report highlights the importance of holistic and systems thinking. A key priority in building a third runway is to consider all impacts on air pollution so inclusive of noise, air quality and carbon emissions. Recently too much of the overall discussion has focussed on just air quality. The report is right to demand that the Government should set out its emissions strategy not only for the Heathrow project but for all areas of UK industry. This needs to include key time-bounded targets.
“The new runway at Heathrow will be hugely valuable to increasing trade and supporting the UK’s growth and productivity, particularly after the UK leaves the European Union. The challenge to doing this, while mitigating the environmental impact, is big but not insurmountable. We need a wide-ranging approach that provides incentives for using lower carbon liquid fuels and retrofit technology to clean up our current transport fleet ahead of new, cleaner and more efficient vehicles becoming widely available.
“A key step Government and industry need to take is to collaborate and to collate more real world evidence so that we have a better picture of the complicated challenge we face.”
Prof. Alastair Lewis, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of York, said:
“The report highlights the considerable uncertainties that exist in trying to estimate concentrations of air pollutants 5, 10 and as far as 20 years out from today; the recent track record with forecasting NO2 does not help instil confidence. Whether the areas around Heathrow will meet current air quality standards will be crucially dependant on how emissions from other sectors evolve over time, and whether predicted reductions from these can offset new pollution arising from expansion. Part of this will depend on the uptake of newer low emissions cars, something highlighted in the report, but it will also depend on continued reductions in emissions from trucks, buses, and other numerous other combustion sources.
“The report focuses particular attention on whether statutory air quality targets will be met and these are a clear set of obligations that the government has to meet. This is a simple a pass / fail test – concentrations just above the limit value and it’s a fail, just below and it’s a pass. However the health impacts of air pollution do not conveniently follow a similarly simple set of pass / fail rules. Elevated air pollution even below limit values is now known to affect health and has a real cost. The ambition should always be for development to aim for as low a concentration of pollution as is practical, not simply to do the minimum necessary to gain a pass-mark.”
* ‘The Airports Commission Report Follow-up: Carbon Emissions, Air Quality and Noise’ by will be published by the Environmental Audit Committee on Thursday 23 February 2017.
Declared interests
None declared