Developing a practical assessment framework for vehicle emissions control measures

Abstract

An assessment from World Health Organization (WHO) showed that there are burden of disease caused by air pollution. More than 2 million premature deaths each year could be attributed to the effects of air pollution. In the past decades, People have been heavily suffering the street-level air pollution, which keeps posing a significant threat to human health. The particulate matters and nitrogen oxides can cause respiratory illness and reduce the lung function, indeed certain fine particles can lead to cancer risk. In fact, a wide range of measures was introduced to control emission with targets to reduce particulate matters and nitrogen oxides, particularly emission from vehicles. It is however not easy to say that there are significant ameliorations, somehow it is perhaps deteriorating in certain extents. It is questioned whether every year the government administrations spend substantial expenses to a worthy use on the subject of vehicle emission control. Clearly, it is necessary to establish an assessment framework which helps draw a clear picture in determining vehicle emission control strategies so as to minimize the inappropriate determination during decision-making processes. In this study, a practical assessment framework concerning vehicle emission control was proposed, comprising two elements, namely policy evaluation criteria and control strategies. The policy evaluation criteria simply aim to assess the performance of the control strategies in several aspects. The selections of these elements based on their universalities. In order to maximize the result reliability, it was decided to gather the opinions from experts regarding these two elements through conducting questionnaire surveys in workshop and international conference. The questionnaires requested the experts ranked these two elements based on their importance and favourite, else rated the control strategies in accordance with the criterion individually. It was observed that the experts' considerations contained differences in the aspects of tackling the vehicle emission regarding their background. The preliminary results showed that the criteria of effectiveness and political acceptability were always recognized as the utmost predominant two while the modification of existing system was the favourite control strategy. These primary results helped identify the weighed coefficient of each policy evaluation criterion. The performance score of each control strategy was further worked out from the rating results. On the basis of the strategy performance score, the implementation lists for Hong Kong and China were recommended. It seemed that the suggested control strategies fairly fitted with their current situation. Else a good combination of control strategies as well as a good selection of policy instrumentation can lead to much more successes. This practical assessment framework can be easily adopted in the other types of environmental issues, such as waste and water pollution, by re-selecting the appropriate policy evaluation criteria and control strategies in accordance with the concerned issues.