Air Quality

A Coordinated Approach

The international community is currently wrestling with the need to limit greenhouse emissions in order to prevent rapid global atmospheric warming. Policymakers perceive climate protection as a long-term challenge whose principal benefits may be reaped by generations yet to be born. However, most of the concrete actions that are available to limit greenhouse gas emissions may also have significant potential to enhance local air quality and contribute to health and other non-climate related benefits right away. 

Climate and air quality protection efforts in most parts of the world tend to be undertaken independently of each other. This lack of coordination has a number of drawbacks from both an economic and an environmental standpoint. Industry finds that it may be faced with multiple bite regulation where it may need in one year to make carbon reductions and in another reductions in conventional air pollutants. The resulting uncertainty itself is a hindrance to long term planning. From an environmental perspective approaching climate and air quality protection in isolation has a number of pernicious effects: less overall environmental protection for the societal resources expended as uncoordinated strategies tend to focus too heavily on end of pipe controls and too little on energy efficiency and switching to less carbon intensive fuels and difficulty in building a public constituency for the changes needed for a transformation to sustainable energy systems.

By designing, implementing and publicizing an integrated strategy for climate and air quality protection immediate benefits in improved respiratory and cardiovascular health may be achieved for the most vulnerable parts of the population - the elderly, the young and asthmatics of all ages. These policies which will achieve significant carbon reductions and climate protection benefits inuring especially to future generations in all countries may be salable in developing countries as the benefits of enhanced air quality are realized by their inhabitants. Besides addressing the North / South disputes that have bedeviled the climate negotiations so long, a harmonized strategy also addresses intergenerational equity challenges by meeting needs of populations vulnerable to poor urban air quality and at the same time speeding a transition to less carbon intensive energy systems essential for safeguarding the climate of future generations worldwide.

The most detailed work on harmonized strategies for climate and air quality protection is contained in a STAPPA/ALAPCO study released in late 1999 describing how such strategies might be carried out in the US.  Some of these strategies are being built into Mexico City's long range air quality protection plan as Mexican law is more flexible than US law to enable such a harmonized approach to be used.

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