London gets an ‘F’ Grade on air quality

Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen are the leading cities in Europe for combating air pollution according to a ranking of 17 European cities, with Rome, Madrid and London all gaining F grades for their lack of effort to improve air quality.

The European City Ranking is part of the Soot-free for the Climate! campaign. It has been carried out by Friends of the Earth Germany in cooperation with the European Environmental Bureau to highlight what has been done to improve air quality in western European cities. These cities are meant to follow European limits on the release of a number of harmful air pollutants.

Berlin took top spot in the ranking for its efforts to improve air quality. The green groups praised Berlin’s broad strategy to tackle high emitters of dangerous pollutants and reduce car use in the city. As a result, the groups say Berlin provided a good example of a long-term strategy to take people out of their cars and into public transport and other modes of transport such as cycling and walking.

Runners-up Copenhagen and Stockholm were praised for having the best economic incentives, such as congestion charges for vehicles entering the city centre and parking management to reduce the share of vehicles in the city.

Rome, Milan and Düsseldorf came bottom showing few efforts on any of the nine air quality measures used to rank the cities. The measures were selected based on their potential to reduce emissions of particulate matter and soot from traffic and non-road pollution sources.

London, hosts of next year’s Olympics, Madrid and Brussels also gained F grades.

Bad air quality is major health problem in most European cities. In most polluted cities, the average life expectancy is reduced by over two years on average. For the whole of the EU, the health cost of bad air quality is estimated to be nearly half a million premature deaths each year. In economic terms, the health damage from air pollution in 2000 was estimated to amount to between €277 and €790 billion for a year.

Visit http://sootfreecities.eu/ for more information

(Tower Bridge photography courtesy Justin Norris)