The United Nation designated the 7th September as the International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies. “Air pollution is the biggest environmental health risk of our time. It also exacerbates climate change, causes economic losses, and reduces agricultural productivity. It knows no borders – everyone has a responsibility to protect our atmosphere and ensure healthy air for all. By collaborating across borders, sectors, and silos, we can reduce air pollution through collective investments of time, resources and efforts. This International Day of Clean Air for blue skies, we call upon everyone—from governments and corporations to civil society and individuals—to invest in #CleanAirNow. By tackling air pollution proactively, we can achieve transformative change and secure healthy air for all.”
The UN appeal is fully reflected in the motivations, activities and results of our I-CHANGE project. The I-CHANGE project faces the challenge of engaging and promoting the active participation of citizens for addressing climate change, sustainable development and environmental protection in the framework of the European Green Deal, the European Climate Pact and the European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.
The overall driving concept is that citizens and civil society have a central role in the implementation of environmental protection and climate action and their direct involvement is essential to drive a true shift and promotion of changes of behaviours towards more sustainable patterns.
The activities of I-CHANGE are strongly rooted in real society through interaction, co-development and cooperation with selected Living Labs and their stakeholders. Citizens learn about climate change and environmental hazards science and understand how their own behaviour can affect climate change as well as how they can reduce their carbon and environmental footprint through changes in their everyday life.
United Nation highlights how this is a two-fold problem:
- Health impact: tiny, invisible particles of pollution penetrate deep into our lungs, bloodstream and bodies. These pollutants are responsible for about one-third of deaths from stroke, chronic respiratory disease, and lung cancer, as well as one quarter of deaths from heart attack. Ground-level ozone, produced from the interaction of many different pollutants in sunlight, is also a cause of asthma and chronic respiratory illnesses.
- Climate impact: short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) are among those pollutants most linked with both health effects and near-term warming of the planet. They persist in the atmosphere for as little as a few days or up to a few decades, so reducing them can have an almost immediate health and climate benefits for those living in places where levels fall.
I-CHANGE realised an original modelling chain capable to estimate the impacts of behavioural changes on carbon and environmental footprint, climate change mitigation and geo-hydrological hazards.
A first branch and namely an integrated mobility-based behavioural simulation model to simulate the impact of traffic policy scenarios and thereby induced behavioural changes was already completed last year. This year the work was further pursued adding the calculation of the impacts of behavioural changes in terms of carbon and environmental footprint, and greenhouse gases and air pollutant emissions. This was finally concluded with the setup of the last modelling branch resulting in a detailed calculation of behavioural changes impacts in terms of greenhouse gases, air pollutant and short-lived climate forcers concentrations and on climate change mitigation, with a specific focus on the urban environment and thermal extreme events.
In addition, the simulations setup are paving the way to develop original web and mobile tools for calculation of behavioural changes impacts, and for early warning of natural and hazard and extreme events (e.g., the Challenge Yeti App for calculation of carbon and environmental footprint).
This modelling effort is solidly grounded on demonstrative practical activities conducted in the I-CHANGE 6 European and 2 non-European Living Labs, where this information is useful to motivate citizens to a (radical – whenever possible) shift of consumption patterns in different cultural and economic settings.