Estimated health impacts from maritime transport in the Mediterranean region and benefits from the use of cleaner fuels

Abstract

Ship traffic emissions degrade air quality in coastal areas and contribute to climate impacts globally. The estimated health burden of exposure to shipping emissions in coastal areas may inform policy makers as they seek to reduce exposure and associated potential health impacts. This work estimates the PM 2.5 -attributable impacts in the form of premature mortality and cardiovascular and respiratory hospital admissions, from long-term exposure to shipping emissions. Health impact assessment (HIA) was performed in 8 Mediterranean coastal cities, using a baseline conditions from the literature and a policy case accounting for the MARPOL Annex VI rules requiring cleaner fuels in 2020. Input data were (a) shipping contributions to ambient PM 2.5 concentrations based on receptor modelling studies found in the literature, (b) population and health incidence data from national statistical registries, and (c) geographically-relevant concentration-response functions from the literature. Long-term exposure to ship-sourced PM 2.5 accounted for 430 (95% CI: 220–650) premature deaths per year, in the 8 cities, distributed between groups of cities: Barcelona and Athens, with > 100 premature deaths/year, and Nicosia, Brindisi, Genoa, Venice, Msida and Melilla, with tens of premature deaths/year. The more stringent standards in 2020 would reduce the number of PM 2.5 -attributable premature deaths by 15% on average. HIA provided a comparative assessment of the health burden of shipping emissions across Mediterranean coastal cities, which may provide decision support for urban planning with a special focus on harbour areas, and in view of the reduction in sulphur content of marine fuels due to MARPOL Annex VI in 2020.

Potential and limiting factors in the use of alternative fuels in the European maritime sector

“…Apart from GHG emissions, combustion engines emits also other local pollutants (i.e PMs Viana et al. (2020) ) and alternative fuels can only contribute to reduce these to a small amount.…”

A city-level analysis of air pollution, climate and COVID-19 early spread during the Spanish lockdown

“…Due to combustion processes, road traffic is the main emission source of atmospheric PM2.5 (Nicolás et al, 2020). Other sources of PM2.5 in urban environments include Sahara dust events (Fenech and Aquilina, 2020;Nicolás et al, 2020), shipping (Viana et al, 2020), secondary inorganic aerosol or biomass burning (Liu et al, 2020), combustion processes in thermal power stations and other industrial sectors, the transport of anthropogenic aerosols from central Europe to Mediterranean areas, and certain agricultural activities (García et al, 2019). Spain, which still consumes a considerable amount of fossil fuels, is quite near to the Sahara Desert and has approximately 47 million inhabitants.…”

“…The Mediterranean zone has been identified as a crossroads of air masses with many kinds of aerosols caused by many anthropogenic and natural sources, such as the resuspension of dust from Africa, the production of sea salt, industrial and urban aerosols, fires, and smoke from Eastern Europe (Lemou et al, 2020). The zone is also known for its intensive shipping traffic, near a densely populated and environmentally sensitive area with low atmospheric dispersion (Viana et al, 2020). Since Spain has been positioned as one of the ten most climatically differing nations (Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino.…”

Chemical Pollutants in Closed Spaces of Transportation and Storage of Non-Dangerous Goods: A Combined Qualitative Approach

“…Goods and products are mainly carried by container ships, trains, trucks and airplanes in multimodal ways between countries and continents. Environmental impacts of freight transport are well-known, such as the harmful emission containing greenhouse gases (GHG), like carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), nitrous oxide (N 2 O) and other environmental pollutants [1,2,3]. However, these impacts may be underestimated in the workplace environments of transportation and storage of non-hazardous cargos, which involves a signi cant number of workers all over the world [5].…”