Air can be polluted even when the day is sunny, and though it might seem that there is no pollution, a glance at an air quality app that most of us have on our phones can prove the opposite. However, this data cannot be accessed without the presence of air quality monitoring stations which are installed by the Environmental Protection Agency in cooperation with the city (Locations are to be provided by the city).
The latest Air Quality Plan refers to the period from 2021 to 2031 and includes 80 measures for the reduction and prevention of air pollution in Belgrade, one of them being the increase in the number of monitoring devices and measuring points for air control.
By doing this, as stated in the Plan, the quality of the information provided to citizens is improved, to preserve public health, but the mentioned provision in no way contributes to the reduction of pollution, which has been on the rise in the past years.
Currently, there is no precise information on the number of operative monitoring stations in Belgrade — according to the City Institute for Public Health’s data, there are 23 Air Quality Monitoring Stations (AQMS), while the Agency for Environmental Protection’s website counts 27 stations within the capital. The total number of monitoring stations across the entirety of Serbia’s territory, according to SEPE data, is 68, which is, to a significant extent, a smaller number of distributed working stations relative to the capital.
Given that almost half of the AQMS is located on the territory of Belgrade alone, it is questionable why the Air Quality Plan (in the agglomeration of Belgrade) states as one of the measures the urgency to allocate certain funds from the budget for new stations.
Milenko Jovanović and Dejan Lekić from the National Ecological Association, emphasize that additional installations of such stations are entirely unnecessary because the success of quality management of air is not evaluated by the number of newly acquired superfluous analyzers and stations, but by the level of emission reduction which causes excessively polluted air.
Ognjan Pantić from the Belgrade Open School also states that there are no such funds set aside for the implementation of the Plan, nor any visible coordination on carrying out and reporting of the Plan to the City Administration, and points out that this is what the focus should be on.
Additionally, there is no information about the exact locations at which AQMS would be placed.
„Even a 1,000 stations will not improve air quality, nor change the existing multi-year diagnosis that the air is excessively polluted,” state Milenko and Dejan from the National Ecological Association.
Ognjan Pantić, on the other hand, describes cooperation between agencies and citizens as one positive example, similar to the American model, where citizens receive instructions on where to get sensors and how to use them, further characterizing citizen involvement in installing AQMS themselves as good.
Apart from the pressure and proving that the Air Quality Improvement Plan was made to not fulfill the essential goals, which is, according to Milenko and Dejan from the National Ecological Association, the adoption and implementation of adequate measures to improve quality, citizens are powerless because institutions do not carry out this job.
All of the above leads us to the conclusion that the money should be diverted to concrete measures that would lead to the reduction of air pollution where measurements already exist and indicate that the air is excessively polluted or introduce monitoring stations in cities where there are no such stations. Therefore, in addition to confirming that the air is of excessively poor quality, institutions should work to reduce that pollution.
0 Comments