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Africa, by Economy, 2020
BOX 3.7
Fuel Quality Standards in the Middle East and North Africa (Continued)
FIGURE B3.7.1
Diesel Sulfur Limits in the Middle East and North Africa, by Economy, 2020
AlgeriaBahrainDjibouti Egypt, Arab Rep.Iran, Islamic Rep. a Iraq JordanKuwaitLebanonLibya MaltaMorocco Oman Qatar a Saudi ArabiaUnited Arab Emirates Tunisia Yemen, Rep.
Diesel sulfur content (ppm)
10–15 ppm 16–50 ppm 51–500 ppm 501–2,000 ppm 2,001–5,000 ppm >5,000 ppm
Source: Based on data from UNEP 2020. Note: The orange line denotes international benchmarks of 10–15 parts per million (ppm). Data for the Syrian Arab Republic and West Bank and Gaza are unavailable. a. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the limit of 50 ppm is applied in several major cities but is not nationally mandated. In Qatar, diesel has a sulfur content of 10 ppm, but this limit is not specifically mandated.
Switching to higher-quality fuel imposes costs on fuel producers, distributors, and end consumers, all of whom may need to be supported. To ease the transition to these new standards, subsidies for technology upgrades by both producers and distributors should be considered. To nudge these actors into faster adoption of the necessary technologies, these programs could be designed such that the subsidies decline during the phase-in period for the implementation and adoption of the new regulations. This would incentivize fuel producers and distributors to avoid postponing necessary investments, hence improving air quality faster. Conversely, to incentivize end consumers to use higher-quality fuel even before standards become mandatory, a gradually increasing tax on lower-quality fuels could be a helpful tool.
Vehicle fuel switching. Increasing the share of vehicles run by alternatives to fossil fuels—for example, electric or hydrogen gas cars—can decrease air pollution. Switching to such alternatives should be accompanied by reforms that also switch energy production away from fossil fuels (as discussed later in the subsection on emissions from energy and industrial sources). However, because the Middle East and North Africa’s economies have high potential for producing electricity from renewable sources, increasing the share of electric vehicles may be an effective means of reducing the region’s air pollution.
Lifting import restrictions and lowering or abolishing tariffs on such vehicles, as was done in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Singh 2015), would lower their prices relative to vehicles run by traditional combustion engines. Incentives could also include purchase subsidies, subsidies for recharging vehicles at public charging stations, and support for the installation of private charging systems. Nonmonetary incentives could include allowing such vehicles to enter LEZs for free, use special lanes shared with public transportation, and use free parking services in shortterm parking zones. Similar incentive schemes for electric cars are in place in several European cities such as Oslo or Stockholm, which have large shares of electric vehicles in their overall vehicle fleets.
To support an electrification of the transportation sector, the needed infrastructure must be put in place. To enable a switch to a cleaner transportation fleet, a transition of the power sector to more renewables is a prerequisite. These challenges are intertwined because the deployment of renewable energy on a large scale requires large-scale investments, as does the broader adoption of electric vehicles. Hence, these changes could and should unlock potential synergies of necessary infrastructure investments, such as installing grid storage solutions for energy derived from renewable sources and charging stations for electric vehicles. Similarly, future projects to expand public transportation systems could also be accompanied by measures to expand the use of alternative propulsion systems—for example, by introducing electric bus fleets as some of the region’s cities did, including Doha, Marrakesh, and Tunis (UITP 2019).
In the Middle East and North Africa, two out of three residents live in urban areas (figure 3.20, panel a), and this figure is set to rise in the coming decades. Moreover, the region’s population is highly concentrated in its largest centers, with more than one-fourth of the population living in an economy’s largest city, outpaced only by Sub-Saharan Africa in this respect (figure 3.20, panel b).
