This briefing note reviews some of the important steps that have been taken on air pollution since last year’s UNEA. It will also highlight three additional sets of recommendations that could bring about more integrated approaches to air pollution and other development priorities in Asia and beyond.
1. Introduction
In mid-February 2019, the eight million residents of Bangkok confronted the latest in a run of serious air pollution crises to elicit serious concern from policymakers and the public in Asia. While historically high levels of fine particulates prompted officials in Thailand to adopt visible emergency measures such as spraying water into the sky, these mostly symbolic actions are likely to be less consequential than a mounting global push to strengthen national and subnational air pollution regulations.
In fact, the same month that soot-filled skies shuttered schools in Bangkok, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published a report entitled Air Pollution in Asia and the Pacific: Science-based Solutions(hereafter Solution Report) outlining 25 policies and measures that could help bring concentrations of fine particulate down to levels that would allow one billion people in Asia to breathe air within concentrations recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) by 2030.
Further, following the third session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) on a “Towards a Pollution-Free Planet” in December 2017, the UNEP indicated its ongoing commitment to improving air quality. Though this year’s UNEA did not place as great an emphasis on air pollution, it does offer a useful milestone to review how UNEP and other stakeholders have aimed to translate “pollution free” aspirations into tangible actions.
The purpose of this briefing note is to review some of the important steps that have been made since last year’s UNEA. It will also highlight three additional sets of recommendations that could bring about more integrated approaches to air pollution and other development priorities in Asia and beyond.
2. Review of actions featured at UNEA
In the lead up to this year’s UNEA, UNEP published “Progress in the implementation of resolution 3/8 on preventing and reducing air pollution to improve air quality globally” updating the main achievements on air pollution since last year’s UNEA. The main areas of attention are divided into
1) monitoring and assessment; 2) policy and technology support; 3) awareness raising and communication; and 4) regional cooperation. The below will review where each of these areas has seen some progress over the past year in Asia.
Starting with monitoring and assessment, UNEP worked with the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC)--a voluntary coalition of state and non-state partners that aims to catalyze action on air pollutants that contribute to near-term climate change known as short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs)--to publish the previously mentioned Solutions Report. As a follow up to that report, UNEP is working with policymakers in Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand to provide country-specific assessments of the health impacts of different solutions that would presumably feed into a wider policy changes. There is also a more general pledge to improve national environmental monitoring systems in the UNEA outcome document.
For both the policy and technology support, and awareness raising and communication, UNEP has turned its attention to cities. The work on cities includes plans to directly support Agra, India and Phnom Penh, Cambodia in their air pollution plans. There is also an expanding effort to raise awareness on air pollution under the auspices of the BreatheLife campaign. BreatheLife is an ongoing effort to enlist cities into a programme that spotlights and spreads news of the good work that cities are doing to combat urban air pollution. In addition, UNEP is getting behind an even broader Beat Pollution campaign that is intended to “reduce pollution in all its forms”, to complement the more narrowly focused work in BreatheLife.
In terms of the last category of action--regional cooperation--UNEP has also made strides in Asia. This progress has been achieved chiefly by the continued support for the Asia Pacific Clean Air Partnership (APCAP). APCAP was founded in 2013 to serve as a platform that facilitated regional cooperation on air pollution in Asia, especially across the wide range of air pollution agreements and initiatives in the region. Furthermore, APCAP hosts a science panel of eminent thinkers in order to provide regional policymakers with insights and inputs on how to reform air pollution policies. APCAP convenes an annual meeting that last year grew into a Clean Air Week in 2018 to support many of these functions.
3. More integrated approaches to air pollution in Asia needed
While UNEP and partners have made notable progress over the past year, there is still scope for improvement and more significant impacts. Following three sets of suggestions relate to taking a more integrated approach to air pollution and other development priorities.
One area requiring additional consideration involves the scale of existing actions. Achieving greater changes in policy and broader results would benefit from more integration across the four different categories of interventions where UNEP has concentrated his attention. For example, it may be useful to provide technical and policy support to cities where there are simultaneous efforts to strengthen air pollution policy at the national level. To a certain extent, this may already be happening as several organisations are working in key countries in Asia. However, the knowledge of who is doing what is not always widely available to relevant stakeholders. To help better share that knowledge, encourage peer learning, and ratchet up ambitions, it may be useful to set up an initiative where countries and other stakeholders can voluntarily, but publicly, submit their actions to improve air quality to a platform such as APCAP. Such an initiative would help to raise the profile of work on air pollution--and would parallel efforts to promote the more voluntary pledge of actions under the climate negotiations such as the Talanoa Dialogue.
A second suggestion involves making links between air pollution and near- and long-term climate change more explicit in policy and practice. In a recent paper, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and CCAC pointed out the potential to incorporate co-benefits into the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that have been submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Building a stronger link between air pollution and climate objectives could also attract additional financial and political support needed to close implementation gaps that often undermine even well-intentioned regulatory reforms. Making these climate-air links could also accompany efforts to enhance coordination across relevant agencies with climate, air and other sectoral portfolios, and benefit from vertical integration between national and subnational actions.
A third and final recommendation relates to the linkages between air pollution and its socioeconomic impacts. Much of the work on air pollution has justifiably looked at its health impacts. This is indeed important because air pollution imposes huge costs on society. Though the health community has become increasingly adept at assessing and explaining these impacts, additional efforts to communicate metrics such as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) to high-level decision makers and policymakers with limited technical background could be intensified with trainings on evaluating and understanding impacts during Clean Air Week and future UNEAs.
At the same time as health needs to feature in communicating impacts, there are also often untapped opportunities to appreciate the impacts of air pollution solutions on other categories of benefits that are both policy relevant and politically salient. Arguably jobs top the list of concerns, but there are also underappreciated effects on poorer segments of society that have the fewest resources to avoid air pollution.
Making stronger links between social and environmental dimensions of air pollution would likewise align well with the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) emphasis on more integrated approaches to development that will be discussed at the Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD) in March and the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) in July. It would also help generate support for the kinds of integrated air pollution strategies that will avert the need to spray water into the sky in the future.