Evaluating the Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Short-Lived Pollutants

Objective

ECLIPSE aims to develop and assess effective emission abatement strategies for short-lived climate agents in order to provide sound scientific advice on how to mitigate climate change while improving the quality of air. Current climate policy does not consider a range of short-lived gases and aerosols, and their precursors (including nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, sulphate, and black carbon). These nevertheless make a significant contribution to climate change and directly influence air quality.

There are fundamental scientific uncertainties in characterizing both the climate and air quality impacts of short-lived species and many aspects (for example, the regional dependence) are quite distinct to those for the longer-lived climate gases already included in the Kyoto Protocol.

ECLIPSE will bring together 11 institutes with established and complementary expertise for a closely co-ordinated 3 year programme. It will build on existing knowledge and use state-of-the-art chemistry and climate models to (i) improve understanding of key atmospheric processes (including the impact of short-lived species on cloud properties) and characterize existing uncertainties; (ii) evaluate model simulations of short-lived species and their long-range transport using ground-based and satellite observations; (iii) perform case studies on key source and receptor regions (focused on Southeastern Europe, China and the Arctic); (iv) quantify the radiative forcing and climate response due to short-lived species, incorporating the dependence on where the species are emitted; (v) refine the calculation of climate metrics, and develop novel metrics which, for example, consider rate of climate warming and go beyond using global-mean quantities; (vi) clarify possible win-win and trade-off situations between climate policy and air quality policy; (vii) identify a set of concrete cost-effective abatement measures of short-lived species with large co-benefits.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• natural sciences chemical sciences organic chemistry volatile organic compounds
• engineering and technology mechanical engineering vehicle engineering aerospace engineering satellite technology
• engineering and technology environmental engineering air pollution engineering
• natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology climatic changes

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

• FP7-ENVIRONMENT - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Environment (including Climate Change)

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

• ENV.2011.1.1.2-2 - Climate forcing of non UNFCCC gases, aerosols and black carbon

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-ENV-2011
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

CP-FP - Small or medium-scale focused research project

Coordinator

Participants (10)