Emissions Inventorying & Forecasting

With aim to assist member states comply with their emission reporting obligations under mainly the UN LRTP and UN FCCC conventions, European Environment Agency and its Topic Centre on Air Emissions appointed LAT with the task of developing a road transport specific tool for estimating and reporting total emissions. Copert (currently in its Copert III version) is a user friendly MS Windows application, including the necessary emission factors, methodology and calculation algorithm to estimate total road-transport emissions on a national, regional or urban level at a year to day-long time resolution. Copert covers all European vehicle technologies since early 70s up to 2010.

An active web-site supports the Copert III activity. The web-site provides the software itself, related documentation, application updates and any latest information. Copert III is being used by several national authorities and academic or research institutions in various applications while the underlying methodology is also adopted by the EEA/EMEP Atmospheric Emission Inventory Guidebook.

Copert III is actually the third update of the original Copert 1985 set up in 1989 in the general framework of the CORINAIR inventory. Since then, a number of research projects and parallel activities have been utilised to update the methodology and emission factors. Main boost has been given by the MEET/COST319 activity supported by the Directorate General VII (Transport). Significant information related to future vehicle technologies has been provided by ACEA during the Auto Oil II activities while effects of maintenance and degradation functions were derived from the DG VII, DG XI, DG XVII study on Inspection and Maintenance effects.

Having a well-documented static tool to calculate emissions on an annual basis (Copert), LAT undertook the task on behalf of Eurostat and Directorate General Transport and Environment to develop an emissions projection tool for road transport in the framework of the TRENDS project (1998 - 2002). TRENDS uses multiple inputs to provide emission projections up to year 2010. On the one hand, it implements the dynamic tools of Copert III (future vehicle technologies, cleaner fuels impact, pollution control systems degradation, etc.). On the other hand, it incorporates the ForeMove methodology to dynamically calculate activity data for each year. ForeMove applies new vehicle registrations and vehicle scrappage rates on past time-series data to derive future fleet densities. This is combined with annual mileage functions of vehicle age to estimate future vehicle usage

This procedure provides consistent activity data and projects emissions for all EU - 15 countries up to 2010. TRENDS has been evolved into a software tool which may be used by European authorities to estimate scenario impacts and technology measures in their policy-making activities