Insufficient or non-existent laws stand in the way of reducing global air pollution

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement reached a record level of 36.6
billion tonnes in 2022. The consequence of this is that poor air quality continues to have a
highly negative impact on human health.

Laws are better than guidelines

In 2021, WHO published updated Global Air Quality Guidelines in which they state that 

six pollutants are the most relevant to monitor:

Recent scientific discoveries have put the threshold of air pollution levels considered harmful to
human health 50% lower today compared to eighteen years ago, when the previous
WHO Air Quality Guidelines were published.

There is, however, one fact that makes the WHO’s Global Air Quality Guidelines insufficient, and
it is not where the exposure thresholds are set - although it is of course very good that the levels
are adjusted according to new scientific findings. What makes the WHO guidelines insufficient is
that they are just that: guidelines and not laws.

No common legal framework

In a recent study, called The First Global Assessment of Air Pollution Legislation, the United Nations
presents an examination of air quality legislation in 194 countries and the European Union. 

According to the study, one-third of all the countries in the world completely lack legally mandated
standards for outdoor air quality. It also concludes that there is no common international legal
framework for global Ambient Air Quality Standards (AAQS). 

The national air quality laws often differ widely, with a whole variety of adopted metrics, standards
and obligations. One of the most significant disparities between countries is that they don’t use the
same scale when measuring AQI. It is also not possible to convert the data since every air quality
index is calculated in a different way. As an example, India, Singapore and the United States, all
use a scale from 0 to 500, but they have dissimilar ways of doing their calculations, making the
resulting values uncomparable.  

In addition, the various countries don’t always give each pollutant the same value, which is often
due to political factors. 

Of all the 194 countries in the UN study, only one third have transboundary laws in place to prevent
air pollution from travelling across borders into other countries. And no more than 7 percent have
laws regulating the quality of indoor air. 

Variations in Air Quality Indexes

Examples of variations in Air Quality Indexes between some individual countries and the European Union:

Best protection indoors

We may have to wait for sufficient progress until most countries have air pollution laws and regulations
in place that are based on the latest scientific facts and fully enforced. However, in the meantime,
there are ways to protect ourselves. The simplest and most efficient protection against harmful airborne
particles is to have high-quality air filtration solutions in our buildings, especially since most of us spend
about 90% of our time indoors. 

We recommend equipping your ventilation system with air filters like Camfil’s City range and investing
in one or several City range air purifiers to deal with the air pollution generated from inside your premises.