The authors of this paper quantified the impact of understudied barriers, revealing that implementation delays result in nearly double the level of PM2.5 emissions over a 10- to 20-year period relative to a scenario where policies are implemented effectively.
Open burning is an affordable way to clear land after harvesting, but contributes to air pollution and its subsequent health impacts.
In Thailand, a new PM2.5 Control Plan and Clean Air Law are opening up a dialogue around burning restrictions. The authors of this paper systematically assessed the prospects of measures designed to curb open burning in Thailand, using an innovative quantitative methodology.
The team investigated how economic, technical, institutional and social barriers could slow the implementation of the Control Plan. Their research revealed that institutional and social barriers caused the greatest delays, though the authors cautioned that these barriers are not easily incorporated into modeling scenarios because they are difficult to quantify. Using SEI’s Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) and a bespoke dataset, the team analyzed the impact of these barriers in different scenarios. The authors combined these results with financial research on implementation costs and found that:
The authors recommended that policymakers enable government agencies to collaborate more frequently to tackle open burning; improve the provision of financial resources to regional decision makers, and capitalize on pre-existing training mechanisms to enhance implementation.
Tool / The Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) is a powerful, versatile system for energy planning and climate change mitigation assessment.
Journal article / Researchers developed an enhanced methodology to estimate future health burdens from air pollution. The new estimates improved strikingly upon previous metrics.
Journal article / The implementation of Pakistan's Clean Air Policy could reduce emissions of air pollutants by up to 80% by 2050.
Journal article / Researchers from our York and Asia centres contributed to the first national and provincial air pollutant emissions inventory for Lao PDR.
