Analysing air pollution like never before

Our goal is to develop an air quality monitoring system that complements those that are currently available. Identifying and measuring the changes in air pollutants will allow European health administrations and agencies to effectively mitigate the impact of poor air quality on human health.

Our specific concerns include two hazards that have increasingly contributed to poor air quality in recent years – nanoparticles and particulate matter fractions in the air.

Atmospheric pollution is the fourth cause of premature mortality in 2019, according to the recent evaluation of the Global Burden of Disease 2020. The global costs associated with air pollution by particulate matter were estimated at 4.5% Gross Domestic Product by the World Bank 2016. In Europe, the European Environmental Agency recently reported almost 0.4 million premature deaths in EU during 2018. Due to the success of European Air Quality policy this number has reduced dramatically since 1990, when as many as 1.0 million premature deaths were estimated to have been caused by poor air quality.

The significant efforts in Europe to abate air pollution have remarkably improved urban air quality, to the extent that, in the last decades, ambient levels of several pollutants decreased markedly (by more than 80% in the case of SO₂). For other pollutants such as NO₂ and particulate matter, the decrease reached 30-50%, especially from 2000 to 2010, but much less since then, and for O₃, NH_3, and Benzo[a]Pyrene, the decrease was very small or negligible. The last report of the European Environmental Agency shows that in 2018 large proportions of the EU urban population were exposed to NO₂, PM10, PM2.5, and O₃ levels exceeding the respective current WHO air quality guidelines.

Changes in emissions in the last decades prompted new urban pollution patterns to be considered in new policy developments and health impact studies.

RI-URBANS provides 16 advanced Service Tools to meet the demands of new and complex urban air quality scenarios and enhance the analysis of air quality.

A Service Tool (ST) is any tool that RI-URBANS has reviewed, tested, and recommended for urban areas. These tools can be used to assess air quality in accordance with RI-URBANS’ advanced air quality monitoring recommendations. These recommendations include protocols for measuring advanced air quality parameters (derived from ACTRIS and CEN or, in specific cases, proposed when not available), mapping protocols, emission inventories, modelling tools, and suggested epidemiological approaches to evaluate the health effects of new pollutants. Clear procedures for using the Service Tools will be provided to the users.

Explore all our advanced Service Tools for optimised urban air quality management:

RI-URBANS will implement 5 pilot studies in 9 selected European cities (Athens, Barcelona, Birmingham, Bucharest, Helsinki, Milan-Bologna, Paris, Rotterdam-Amsterdam, and Zurich) for testing and demonstrating services. These selected European cities represent different air quality environments.

They combine the ability to perform advanced long-term air quality observations and the commitment of the local and/or regional monitoring networks to benefit from the corresponding pilot actions. The former provides the reference to the new air quality observations-metrics to be evaluated and for which their association with health outcomes will be compared with that obtained for conventional metrics. The latter ensures the sustainability of the pilots beyond this project’s lifetime.

A pilot aims to demonstrate on a real scale the ability of air quality research infrastructures to integrate complementary measurement systems and methods, but also the effectiveness of integrating different components of an urban observing system for air quality studies.