The World Health Organization (WHO) published yesterday the new air quality guidelines that replace the existing ones, published in 2005. These new guidelines are the basis on which the states base their legislation on air quality. The new report updates the knowledge on the effects of poor air quality on human health and provides safe and evidence-based thresholds. The IDAEA researchers, Xavier Querol and Aurelio Tobías, from the Environmental Geochemistry and Atmospheric Research, EGAR group, have been part of the ‘External review group’ and co-chairs of the guideline development group.
EU legislation on air quality is based on these guidelines. However, for many pollutants, the EU threshold values (mandatory for the Member States), are much less stringent than the WHO values, which really protect against pollution. To set a legal limit threshold in Europe, WHO scientific criteria, together with economic and political criteria are considered. For this season, EU and WHO values are not the same. In any case, air quality directives tend to be living directives, meaning that although they set more permissive limit values than the WHO guidelines, a plan is usually proposed to get closer to them.
Not only has the evidence of the effect of air pollution on health has been reinforced, but it has also been shown that there are serious effects at pollutant concentrations lower than those proposed by the 2005 guidelines. Today, the European Commission organized a meeting with 300 attendees to begin the process of renewing the directives and their limit values, and the new WHO guidelines constitute their objective.
WHO values are not unreachable. If these thresholds really protect human health, Member States should not exceed them.
Years ago, some of the most advanced countries replaced their own thresholds with those of the WHO (for example, Switzerland or Canada). The fact of not being non-compliance with regulations has forced them to continuously take reduction measures to improve air quality in their territories. On the contrary, those countries that did not take these measures (for example, Spain), register much higher levels of pollution because they have been in legal compliance with obsolete limit values for years.
