Estimating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on pollutant emissions in Europe

Abstract

Changes in primary emissions due to the COVID-19 lockdowns in Europe for the year 2020 have been estimated by considering fully open-access and near-real-time measured activity data from a wide range of information sources and with simple computational techniques. The estimates consist on a dataset of reduction factors that are both time- and country-dependent and provided for the following source categories: energy industry (power plants), manufacturing industry, road traffic, aviation, shipping and other stationary combustion activities such as residential and commercial-institutional activities. Inspired in other authors’ estimates for COVID reductions, the advantage of this methodology is that there is no use of machine learning, making this procedure more accessible to the general scientific community. We have followed a fast methodology that takes advantage of observed relationships between variables (e.g. temperature and energy demand) without needing special algorithms for finding those relationships. The comparison of our estimates with others from other authors indicate a reasonable agreement and pointing out that emissions dropped by a 17% on average in Europe, with large differences between sectors of activities and spatial heterogeneity. The most affected sector was aviation, with a spatial-averaged variation of −63% in emissions since the implementation of first restrictions with respect business-as-usual values. 2020 emission changes with respect to business-as-usual values in countries ranges from a −13% in Norway and Poland to a more than −20% in several Mediterranean countries as well as the United Kingdom. Two main periods of emission reductions have been identified.