Focus Report on Environmental impacts

The impact pathway approach (IPA) developed in the ExternE project series and then further developed in the EU projects NEEDS, CASES, INTARESE, HEIMTSA, TRANSPHORM and others will be used to quantify the health and environmental effects of the different technology pathways. The IPA will be applied to assess health impacts aggregated to DALYs (disability adjusted life years) and environmental impacts (biodiversity losses and land use change) quantified as pdf/m² (potentially disappeared fraction of species per m²). Further, impacts are then converted into damage costs. Using emissions from the EMC2 regional gridded concentrations are calculated using a parametric version of the EMEP model , a multi-layer atmospheric dispersion model for the long-range transport of air pollution. An urban increment model is used as for estimating this PM10 and PM2.5 increment for all European cities > 50 000 people. Results from the non-linear EVA system will be compared to the linearised ECOSENSE system. This includes more realistic source-receptor relationships and estimation of the urban increment. New relationships found by using the process based EVA system will be transferred to ECOSENSE for improved results. The EVA system will be applied for calculation of unit costs of emissions from the energy sector for each country in Europe. These costs will be used as inputs to the Integrated European Model. This will be done for present and future conditions based on emissions and climate changes from Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). The information flow between the tools is explained in more depths in Section 1.3.3.6