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Air pollution control is one of the main challenges facing modern societies. Consequently, the estimation of population, affluence, and technology impacts on air pollution concentrations (STIRPAT modeling) has become the cornerstone of environmental decision-making. Spatial effects are not usually included in STIRPAT modeling of air pollution. However, space matters: accounting for spatial dependencies significantly improves the accuracy of estimates and forecasts, especially (or only) when dealing with small information units rather than with large ones (countries, large regions, provinces in China, counties and states in the USA, etc.). The latter scale is typical in the literature on air pollution due to the difficulties in finding data on its drivers at a true local scale. Accordingly, this paper has a double objective. The first is the estimation of a spatial panel data STIRPAT model, with the spatial units being both very small and also highly autonomous, developed municipalities. The second is to examine whether an environmental Kuznets curve relationship exists between income per capita and NOx concentrations. A case study has been carried out in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, Spain, at the municipal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current European legislation aims to reduce the air pollutants emitted by European countries in the coming years. In this context, this article studies the effects on air quality of the measures considered for 2030 in the Spanish National Air Pollution Control Programme (NAPCP). Three different emission scenarios are investigated: a scenario with the emissions in 2016 and two other scenarios, one with existing measures in the current legislation (WEM2030) and another one considering the additional measures of NAPCP (WAM2030). Previous studies have addressed this issue at a national level, but this study assesses the impact at the street scale in three neighborhoods in Madrid, Spain. NO2 concentrations are modelled at high spatial resolution by means of a methodology based on computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations driven by mesoscale meteorological and air quality modelling. Spatial averages of annual mean NO2 concentrations are only estimated to be below 40 µg/m3 in all three neighborhoods for the WAM2030 emission scenarios. However, for two of the three neighborhoods, there are still zones (4–12% of the study areas) where the annual concentration is higher than 40 µg/m3. This highlights the importance of considering microscale simulations to assess the impacts of emission reduction measures on urban air quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]