Air quality regimes are moving forward as science evolves and policy ambitions wide open, researchers say

Failure to coordinate legal, political and scientific thinking risks “a missed opportunity” to improve air quality, concludes new environmental law research co-led by a UCL academic.

In theirs science The paper, “Using science, policy and law to deliver clean air”, Professors Eloise Scotford (UCL Faculty of Law), Alastair Lewis (University of York) and Delphine Misonne (UCLouvain Saint-Louis, Brussels) reviews the research recent and highlight the significant risks to achieving clean air globally.

Despite significant advances in air quality law and policy in some parts of the world in recent decades, scientific evidence points to health damage from air pollution at ever-lower concentrations, making clean air increasingly more urgent, but also more difficult to achieve.

Research shows that, for many national regulatory regimes, raising policy ambitions and air quality outcomes is not just a matter of raising legal standards to the level of the World Health Organization’s Air Quality Guidelines.

Recognizing this complexity, scholars emphasize the need to move from policy ambition to policy delivery, through the skillful integration of scientific, policy-making and legal knowledge.

“Once-in-a-generation transitions, if not accompanied by a review of air quality impacts and a coordinated regulatory refresh, could lead to a loss of opportunity,” they say in their paper.

The researchers highlight several areas where coordinated action is needed: around setting standards; deciding which pollutants to approve; setting targets for reducing pollution and ensuring that it does not exceed certain levels; urban planning including consideration of the impact of air pollution on deprived communities and ethnic minority groups; and the coordination of policy making at the local, national and supranational levels.

One of these issues – deciding which pollutants to regulate – concerns the fact that a relatively small number of pollutants have been the focus of air quality laws for the past four decades, but these may need to be expanded to better represent the current state of the science in terms of toxicology and harm.

The problem, they say, is that “legally enshrined standards are generally created only when scientific evidence of harm is considered convincing by lawmakers,” leading to “criteria pollutants” such as very fine particles known as PM2.5 that are commonly regulated today. . . Being cheap and easy to measure, PM2.5 has become the “de facto variable” in health studies, they say.

But they add, “There is potential merit in limit values ​​for black carbon, ultrafine particles, formaldehyde, or particulate matter subcomponents such as secondary organic aerosol; however, each must still weigh the weight of evidence to be made legal obligations.”

To help counter this bias, researchers are calling for “exploratory” observations of air pollution, following the preliminary principle, “ideally” along with research funding to stimulate them.

Another key issue in ensuring that clean air policies are achievable and implemented is policy coordination.

The benefits of reducing air pollution and climate emissions have “long been articulated by the scientific community, but there is an unrecognized need for legal and regulatory coordination as well,” the researchers say in their paper.

They cite the example of low-carbon aviation fuels, saying that carbon regulation alone “does not guarantee better air quality”.

The climate commitment to adopt low-carbon fuels can only succeed in reducing pollution if there are “parallel, internationally accepted regulatory requirements for reduced engine emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter”, they say.

In their conclusion to their paper, the researchers say: “To advance the debate, we argue that increasing the scope for dynamic regulatory development at the science-law-policy interface is an important pathway to accelerating the achievement of global air goals. Clean. .”