London could learn a thing or two about air pollution from Estonia, Zurich and even Beijing.
Air pollution causes respiratory and cardiovascular disease, strokes, lung cancer and other astute breathing problems – and the air in the UK is not clean. A parliamentary committee called the state of our air a national emergency earlier this month.
When it comes to cleaning up the air, we have a lot to learn from the rest of the world, even China.
After years of polluted air, China is finally taking its clean-up seriously. Ten of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India, and three are in China, according to the World Health Organization, but China has started tackling the problem. In Beijing, fines for pollution topped $28 million in 2015. In the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, levels of PM2.5, particles with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, decreased by 27 per cent between 2013 and 2016. The fine particles of PM 2.5 are considered particularly dangerous because, once inhaled, they sit deep inside the lungs.
"China’s push to abandon fossil fuels and embrace alternative energy as well as the ditching conventional vehicle and switching to electric vehicles are some of the things, we can learn from China," says Gary Haq, a researcher into urban air pollution at the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York.
China also has the highest electric vehicle (EVs) usage in the world. In 2017, the country sold 777,000 new EVs, an increase on the previous year of 53 per cent, making China’s share roughly half of the 1.2 million plug-ins sold worldwide in 2017. By 2025, China plans to have sold 35 million electric vehicles.
The same can’t be said for the UK – and that’s especially true in London. The capital is behind many other cities when it comes to air pollution. Research published earlier this week found the city was joint third worst out of all the European capitals. Europe’s best is topped by Copenhagen, which boasts the cleanest air, followed by Amsterdam, Oslo and Zurich.
The UK government has a plan – a clean air plan that was published earlier this week – but whether it will work is debatable. The strategy has been criticized by the Labor party, who called it “hugely disappointing”, and others said it did little to tackle the main source of toxic air in our cities, diesel vehicles.
But when it comes to how to clean up our air, it is not as simple as copying and pasting another city’s road to success. “Each city can differ in geography, population, infrastructure, meteorology, pollution sources and air quality monitoring, which are just some of the factors that influence our understanding of the state of air quality in a city,” says Haq.
The main source of pollution in London is transport – vehicles pack congested roads forcing levels higher. Transport causes the emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, also created when wood and coal are burnt.
One way to decrease the amount of air pollution in London would be to reduce the cost of public transport to reduce the number of vehicles on our roads. This is something Estonia is looking into, with a trial of free public transport across the country for local people going ahead this year. Zurich has put in place effective schemes to reduce air pollution. Its tactics include strict standards for new vehicles, particulate filters on all road vehicles since 2010, high parking fees in the city, and a move towards public trams, trolleybuses and buses.
London mayor Sadiq Khan has proposed car-free days – a system which Paris has trailed – but nothing has been agreed upon yet.
Learning from this could help London. Increasing walking and cycling infrastructure, banning cars with combustion engines, especially diesel cars, introducing EV vehicle car-sharing schemes and considering how freight is delivered to shops are all good ideas, Haq says. However, he adds, it comes down to politics.
“We have the solutions to our air quality problem, we just need to implement them, but this requires a change in the mindset of politicians and the public,” Haq says. “We need to think about how we travel if we are to improve the air we breathe in cities.”
We also need to think about the country as a whole, as the pollution in one city is not necessarily only confined to that place. “Both local sources, pollution released from within the city, and transported sources, released from somewhere else, matter,” says Jenny Fisher, from the University of Wollongong in Australia.
“If we’re thinking about a city, the transported component will always be smaller than the local component – we can’t really ‘blame’ somewhere upwind for city-scale pollution problems,” she says. “But the transported component can make the problem worse, and this especially becomes important in thinking about meeting regulatory requirements.” For example, the west coast of the US and Canada is influenced by pollution released over Asia.
Simply put: air pollution is a global problem. A UNICEF report in December last year found 17 million babies under the age of one live in areas where pollution is more than six times higher than international limits.
However, there is one slither of hope when it comes to air pollution – it’s much more fixable than climate change. “As someone who thinks about both air pollution and climate change, I’d say air pollution definitely feels like a more tractable problem,” says Fisher. “If you could magically remove all cars from London, the impacts would be seen rapidly.”
Most pollutants are gone from the atmosphere within a couple of weeks, and they often get moved out of the city with winds and rain even more quickly than that. Health effects of pollution, however, are more long-term. This means the health of someone in the future would be affected by exposure in the past, before things were cleaned up.
