Emissions of air pollutants from road transport in Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East region

Road transport is a major contributor to pollutant emissions in the Middle East region (MEA). Emissions originating from this sector have a significant impact on the atmosphere, health and the climate change. Identification and quantification of these emissions in this region is of great importance in order to develop emissions reductions strategies. For this purpose and because a detailed emission inventory for road transport is nonexistent for Lebanon (a small developing country in the MEA region) and for its capital city Beirut, a spatially-resolved and temporally-allocated emission inventory for road transport was developed for Lebanon and for the city of Beirut using a bottom-up approach where possible. In order to compare emissions between developed and non-developed cities on the Mediterranean basin, road transport emissions originating in normal (February–June and September–November) and touristic periods (July–August and December–January) were compared between Beirut, Barcelona and Athens, respectively. The comparison obtained between Beirut, Barcelona and Athens showed that emissions per capita for CO and SO2 are highest in Beirut while emissions of particulate matter were highest in Barcelona. The different patterns between these cities showed that emissions increases in winter in Beirut and Barcelona (11 and 9% respectively) and decreases in the city of Athens by 9%. In summer, an increase of 15% in traffic intensities is observed in Athens while in Beirut and Barcelona, traffic intensities decrease by 10 and 40% respectively. ational level, emissions were calculated for 14 countries in the MEA in order to inter compare them with those of Lebanon. The results show that in the MEA, the highest contributors to total carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions (78 and 79% respectively), are countries having a population that exceeds 20 million inhabitants such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt. For Lebanon, emissions per capita are important because they are higher than those for many countries in the region.