Air Quality Estimation in Ukraine Using SDG 11.6.2 Indicator Assessment

Andrii Shelestov,Nataliia Kussul,Bohdan Yailymov,Hanna Yailymova

doi:10.3390/rs13234769

Abstract

Ukraine is an associate member of the European Union, and in the coming years, it is expected that all the data and services already used by European Union countries will become available for Ukraine. An important program, which is the basis for building European monitoring services for smart cities, is the Copernicus program. The two most important services of this program are the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). CLMS provides important information on land use in Europe. In the context of smart cities, the most valuable tool is the Urban Atlas service, which is related to local CLMS services and provides a detailed digital city plan in vector form, which is segmented into small functional areas classified by Coordinate Information on the Environment (CORINE) nomenclature. The Urban Atlas is a geospatial layer with high resolution, built for all European cities with a population of more than 100,000. It combines high-resolution satellite data, city segmentation by blocks and functional urban areas (FUAs), important city infrastructure, etc. This product is used as a basis for city planning and obtaining analytics on the most important indicators of city development, including air quality monitoring. For Ukraine, such geospatial products are not provided under the Copernicus program. In this article, FUAs are developed for Ukrainian cities using European technology. It is important to start work on this program’s implementation as early as possible so that when the first city atlas appears, Ukraine will be ready to work with it together with the European community. This requires preparing the basis for national research and training national stakeholders and consumers to use this product. To make this happen, it is necessary to have a national geospatial product that can be used as an analogue of the city atlas. In this article, the authors analyzed the existing methods of air quality assessment and the Global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 11.6.2, “Annual mean levels of fine particulate matter (e.g., PM2.5 and PM10) in cities (population weighted)”, achieved for European cities. Based on this, indicator 11.6.2 was then evaluated for the first time in Ukraine, considering the next 5 years. For the correct use of global products for Ukraine, CAMS global satellite data and population data (Global Human Settlement Layer and NASA population data) for Ukrainian cities were validated. These studies showed a statistically significant result and, therefore, demonstrated that global products can be used to monitor air quality both at the city level and for Ukraine as a whole. The obtained results were analyzed, and the values of indicator 11.6.2 for Ukraine were compared with those for other European countries.

Highlights

There are currently many projects in the world that develop and use information technology to aggregate, analyze, and visualize information about air pollution in cities, these provide urban residents with timely information about possible dangers
The methodology for calculating the Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 11.6.2 is based on the methodology proposed by the UN and used within the SMURBS project [15], the main goal of which was to collect best practices to promote the concept of the “smart city” and use it for as many cities as possible by integrating satellite observations to increase the resilience of the environment and society to urban impact
All participants use the same type of input to carry out their research and air quality monitoring projects in pilot cities: data from portable sensor ground stations, satellite data, and Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) model data [18]

Summary

Introduction

There are currently many projects in the world that develop and use information technology to aggregate, analyze, and visualize information about air pollution in cities, these provide urban residents with timely information about possible dangers. The information sources for such monitoring systems are ground air quality measurement stations and Remote Sens. There are projects that monitor air quality for a particular country but for many countries or regions One of these such projects is Smart Urban. ERA-Planet program, within which the National Observatory of Athens has developed a platform for monitoring indicator 11.6.2, “Annual mean levels of fine particulate matter in cities”, for 800 cities and 37 European countries [1]. Ukraine is not included in the list of countries monitored on this platform, and that is why the question of the development of a similar product for Ukraine arises.

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Results

Conclusion