Debate: Ambient air quality and cleaner air for Europe
Date: TUESDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2023
Speaker: Virginijus Sinkevičius
Language: EN

Clean air is essential for all of us: our health, our environment, and our whole economy depend on it. So we must tackle this problem with ambition and a sense of urgency and with the clear objective of achieving better air quality by 2030 and zero pollution by 2050. With the European green deal and the zero pollution action plan, we are strongly committed to these objectives and in line with the expectations of EU citizens. It is for all of us to deliver on those commitments. Nearly 300 000 Europeans die prematurely each year as a result of air pollution. This is a huge number of lives we cannot afford to lose. Scientists, citizens, as well as this House, have called for urgent action to drastically reduce this figure and align to what are the science recommendations. In the Green Deal, we made a commitment to revise air quality standards and to align them more closely with the recommendations of the WHO. We also committed to strengthening provisions on monitoring, modelling and air quality plans to help local authorities achieve cleaner air. And this is exactly what we have done. Our proposal sets out four essential elements to substantially improve EU air quality. The first one is ambitious, yet achievable air quality standards. Our thorough impact assessment confirms that this is entirely feasible from both the technical and the socioeconomic point of view. The second is preserving and enhancing the reliability and robustness of the monitoring network with increased use of cost-effective methods like modelling. The third is better and more harmonised information for citizens, including on the health effects of air pollution. Lastly, we strengthen the provisions for governance and enforcement, and this includes establishing a new right for citizens to seek compensation for damaged health – also through collective action – building on well-established procedural guarantees, which makes collective redress action in the EU very different from other leading international jurisdictions. Honourable Members, let me conclude on the most critical issues. The new standards we propose are stricter, but also implementable. Our robust impact assessment confirms that they can be achieved by 2030 at up to 94% of EU monitoring stations with benefits that are at least seven times greater than the cost. It also shows that neither lowering nor delaying those standards is an option, as those changes would bear unacceptable costs in terms of human lives. And not only, as I said, any year we are losing the lives of 300 000 citizens. Our proposed standards would allow to decrease the premature deaths from air pollution by at least 70% in the next ten years. Thanks also to the synergies we can build with ambitious measures already adopted on transport, energy, the proposal would also lead to gross annual benefits estimated at between EUR 42 billion and EUR 121 billion in 2034, for less than a EUR 6 billion cost annually. Dear colleagues, I look forward to hearing your views and this is a very crucial and important topic, which I am sure is dear to European hearts, too.