A "Clean" Project from Environmental Engineering

The BAU Department of Environmental Engineering continues to break new ground with its scientific work. The "National Air Pollution Emission Management System", established for the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization with 4.5 million TL in support provided by TÜBİTAK, is being led by BAU Environmental Engineering.

In our country, policy-making and implementation efforts are being carried out to protect and improve air quality. Today, the work and legal practices carried out to protect and monitor air quality have become even more important as environmental awareness has taken root. The aim is to improve air quality through developing technologies, alternative fuels and environmentally friendly regulations. Within the framework of our national and international obligations, efforts are being made to reduce the limit values of pollutant parameters both at the source and in the ambient air in order to protect air quality.

Determining the current situation is of great importance in setting policies for protecting and improving air quality. To accurately determine the current situation and prepare clean air action plans, the emission amounts and distributions of air pollutants by source must be established on a national scale.

Within the scope of our national and international responsibilities, the amounts of air pollutants must be reported at specific intervals. These reports must be prepared in specific formats using information on pollution sources and emission factors. There is a need to collect information on our country's pollution sources, enter it into a sustainable system, define the system that will ensure data flow and the duties and responsibilities of stakeholders, and create a software environment for data entry. A national methodology must also be developed for calculating emissions using the collected information.

To meet the needs mentioned above, the proposed project aims at:

• Establishing a national system for preparing an emission inventory,
• Calculating emissions by implementing the developed system in a pilot region,
• Determining the temporal and spatial distribution of emission calculations in the pilot region,
• Running air quality models with the calculation results for the pilot region and preparing air pollution reduction plans,
• Comparing air quality modeling results with measurement results,
• Building capacity so that the project outputs can be applied in other regions,
• Drawing up a roadmap for developing a national emission inventory and ensuring its continuity.

The project will be led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Göksel Demir from the Bahçeşehir University Department of Environmental Engineering, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Alper Ünal from the Istanbul Technical University Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, and Banu Altay from Proline Bilişim Sistemleri ve Ticaret A.Ş.