The European Parliament has voted to strengthen the Ambient Air Quality Directive by fully aligning with the WHO recommendations
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Wednesday September 13th 2023, the European Parliament voted to strengthen regulation of air pollution and to new legally binding limit values for air quality fully aligning with the World Health Organization’s Air Quality Guidelines (AQGs). This is a strong signal to EU member states to act on air pollution, which remains Europe's largest environmental health risk.
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Go to the home pageMore than 96% of the urban population in Europe is exposed to harmful levels of air pollution and more than 60% of European cities have annual air pollution levels more than twice as high as the WHO recommendations.
The adopted amendments the European Parliament commits to implies that “an ambitious approach towards setting current and future EU air quality standards should be pursued, establishing air quality standards for the year 2035, including intermediate air quality standards for 2030, and at regular intervals beyond, and developing a perspective for continuous full alignment with the most up-to-date WHO Air Quality Guidelines in order to achieve the zero pollution objective by the year 2050 at the latest based on a regular review mechanism to take into account the latest scientific evidence.”
The full alignment with the WHO AQG was moved from 2030 to 2035, but the European Parliament has committed to adopt “the most up-to-date” recommendations by WHO. This means that future updates of the WHO AQG should be incorporated in the Zero Pollution Action Plan, including potential future recommendations for regulations of ultrafine particles and other currently unregulated air pollutants of concern.
This is an important move to protect the health of European Citizens, but the member states of the European Council also need to commit to this more ambitious plan to reduce air pollution. Meanwhile, we continue our work to support the EU legislations on air quality by strengthening the scientific evidence base and developing recommendations for more targeted strategies to improve air quality.
