CONCAWE Review – Year of air 2014 (special issue)

The Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution (2005) has been under review since 2011 with the first of five stakeholder meetings taking place in January 2012. The underpinning work is very complex and relies heavily on modelling studies. CONCAWE as an active stakeholder has participated in all of the formal engagement meetings and performed its own analyses working from two viewpoints. Firstly to understand the work taking place, and secondly to contribute insights that should lead to more robust policy conclusions being drawn.

This work has been reported via the CONCAWE Review (CONCAWE 2012a, CONCAWE 2012b) and technical contributions to the Stakeholder consultation1.The aim of this special issue of the CONCAWE Review is to bring together in a single document all recent information that CONCAWE has generated in the field of the integrated assessment modelling and cost-benefit analysis related to air policies2, with a special focus on the uncertainties/sensitivities and their implications for the policy-making process. Some of the information is published for the first time in this issue (e.g. on ecosystem services).

To make this material more accessible to non-specialists in the field, at the beginning of each subsection there is a short summary of the main outcomes of each CONCAWE study and where possible and appropriate this has been expressed in simplified form.