Régulation et Environnement

Du 04/11/2024 de 11:00 à 12:15

SAGER Lutz (ESSEC)

*Low Emission Zones and Environmental Justice

Low emission zones (LEZ) represent a key national environmental policy instrument used to explicitly address air pollution in cities throughout Europe. LEZs have successfully reduced air pollution and associated health damages in regulated areas. But how are air quality benefits distributed in society? To address this question, we examine the Environmental Justice implications of LEZs in Germany. We combine gridded data on resident characteristics, including income and a proxy for ethnicity, with high-resolution estimates of fine particle (PM2.5) concentrations. We estimate heterogeneous treatment effects with a difference-in-differences approach and confirm previous findings that LEZs have reduced PM2.5 exposures. We show that these pollution reductions are distributed unequally because air quality improvements within targeted areas are heterogeneous and because residents of targeted zones are not representative of the overall population. We find that LEZ-induced air quality benefits are distributed pro-poor within LEZs, meaning that they are larger in areas with lower income. We show that this finding is sensitive to how benefits from cleaner air scale with income when assessed from a nationwide perspective. In addition, while pollution reductions accrue dis-proportionally to Germans within LEZs, they accrue dis-proportionally to non-Germans nationwide due to a spatial clustering of non-Germans in larger cities. Overall, our results suggest that LEZs, as implemented in Germany, yield nuanced Environmental Justice implications.