Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment: Methodology Guide

The World Resources Institute's Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment (TESCA) guide and Excel tool provide a framework for developing countries to quantify transport emissions (covering 9 pollutants and 18 transport modes) and their associated social costs. The process involves data quality analysis, inventory estimation, and the calculation of eco-efficiency indicators to support cost-efficient policy-making, while explicitly addressing the high uncertainties inherent in social cost and health data.

• The Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment (TESCA) tool and guide are designed to estimate inventories for 18 transport modes across nine specific pollutants: six air pollutants (NOX, SOX, PM2.5, PM10, CO, and HC) and three greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, and N2O). The methodology is applicable at both the city and national levels, specifically targeting regions with "limited data accessibility and weak data quality."
• The transport emissions impact evaluation process consists of six main components: defining the study scope, performing data quality analysis (based on availability, localization, frequency, and accuracy), estimating emissions inventories, evaluating social costs (including monetization and uncertainty evaluation), calculating indicative eco-efficiency results, and conducting a results review for local justification.
• The tool produces four primary types of indicative results: emissions inventories, emissions social costs, data quality analysis, and eco-efficiency indicators. Examples of these indicators include emissions social cost per capita, emissions social cost per unit of GDP, and tonnes of PM2.5 per vehicle kilometer traveled (VKT).
• The methodology acknowledges that social cost evaluations, particularly health costs, contain higher levels of uncertainty than emissions inventory estimates due to the uneven availability and reliability of data. The guide aims to raise awareness of these uncertainties to encourage policymakers to allocate more resources to obtain reliable estimates.
• The first version of the tool was developed in 2014 and was tested in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China.

APA

World Resources Institute (n.d.). Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment: Methodology Guide. https://www.wri.org/research/transport-emissions-social-cost-assessment-methodology-guide

Chicago

World Resources Institute. Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment: Methodology Guide. n.d. https://www.wri.org/research/transport-emissions-social-cost-assessment-methodology-guide.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment: Methodology Guide |url=https://www.wri.org/research/transport-emissions-social-cost-assessment-methodology-guide |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitutendtransport, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{Transport Emissions \& Social Cost Assessment: Methodology Guide}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://www.wri.org/research/transport-emissions-social-cost-assessment-methodology-guide}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }