Latest ETC Reports (included in homepage)

The report aims to investigate how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can be applied in forested landscapes to reduce wildfire and pest outbreak risks, but also to improve the resilience of forests and support their recovery after such disturbances. It also discusses commonalities and divergences in conditions and strategies for NbS implementation across case studies, and identifies key learning points and remaining challenges.

This report evaluates the health burden due to long-term exposure to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 across Europe in 2022. By analysing all-cause and cause-specific mortality and morbidity, it estimates disease burden using four indicators: Attributable Deaths (AD), Years of Life Lost, Years Lived with Disability, and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY). However, the main results only consider the impact of exposure to levels of pollutants exceeding the current WHO air quality guidelines. The results indicate that PM2.5 contributes the most significant health impact (linked to six diseases), resulting in over 2.7 million DALY across 40 countries, and resulting in 269 000 AD, with mortality rates peaking in Eastern Europe. The report introduces methodological advancements, assessing the long-term impacts of O3 for the first time. Findings underscore the critical need for targeted air quality interventions, as pollution continues to drive significant health losses across the continent, particularly among vulnerable populations.

The report provides the annual update of the European air quality concentration maps and population and vegetation exposure estimates for human health related indicators of pollutants PM10 (annual average, 90.4 percentile of daily means), PM2.5 (annual average), ozone (93.2 percentile of maximum daily 8-hour means, peak season average of maximum daily 8-hour means, SOMO35, SOMO10), NO2 (annual average) and benzo(a)pyrene (annual average), and vegetation related ozone indicators (AOT40 for vegetation and for forests) for the year 2022. The report contains also maps of Phytotoxic ozone dose (PODY) for selected crops (wheat, potato and tomato) and trees (spruce and beech) and NOx annual average map for the same year 2022. The ozone map of peak season average of maximum daily 8-hour means is presented for the first time. The trends in exposure estimates in the period 2005–2022 are summarized. The analysis for 2022 is based on the interpolation of the annual statistics of the 2022 observational data reported by the EEA member and cooperating countries and other voluntary reporting countries and stored in the Air Quality e-reporting database, complemented, when needed, with measurements from additional sources. The mapping method is the Regression – Interpolation – Merging Mapping (RIMM). It combines monitoring data, chemical transport model results and other supplementary data using linear regression model followed by kriging of its residuals (residual kriging). The paper presents the mapping results and gives an uncertainty analysis of the interpolated maps. It also presents concentration change in 2022 in comparison to the five-year average 2017-2021 using the difference maps and exposure estimates.

Tropospheric ozone impacts agricultural crop and timber production entailing significant economic effects for the sector. In the early 2000’s an indicator for calculating this impact was proposed by the expert group in the IPC-Vegetation working in support of the Air Convention. That indicator is based on the phytotoxic ozone dose above a threshold y (PODy). Within the ETC HE and its predecessor ETC/ATNI, annual production of PODy maps started in 2020. To make it more relevant for air quality assessment the ozone flux calculations are not only translated into yield losses in %, but also into yield losses expressed in terms of quantity and economic value. In this present report an impact modelling chain to quantify and monetize the loss in wheat and potato production due to tropospheric ozone exposure for 2022 has been implemented. The sensitivity of the results to the degree of spatialization of the input data was also investigated.