The environmental organisation has indicated that this pollutant is emitted into urban air “mainly by motorised traffic” in urban areas and has once again called for policies to improve air quality that reduce the presence of cars in our urban areas. In total, it has collected provisional data from official air quality monitoring stations in 15 cities with a total of eleven million inhabitants, i.e. a quarter of the Spanish population.
In this framework, they have highlighted that the highest levels of NO2 have been registered during the last year in the stations Eixample in Barcelona, Plaza Elíptica in Madrid, Granada Norte, Olivereta in Valencia, Avenida Juan XXIII in Málaga and San Basilio in Murcia, which have had “an annual average concentration equal to or higher than 30 micrograms (of NO2) per cubic metre of air”.
At the same time, they warned that the remaining nine cities that have been analysed have also exceeded 20 micrograms of NO2 per cubic metre of air. In this regard, he highlighted the measurements at the Felisa Munárriz station in Pamplona (28), María Díaz de Haro in Bilbao (26), Torneo in Seville (24), Plaza de Pontevedra in A Coruña (24) and El Picarral in Zaragoza (23). In general terms, it has specified that the smallest cities have registered the lowest NO2 concentrations, such as Oviedo (Palacio de Deportes, 22), Palma (Foners, 22), Córdoba (Avenida Al-Nasir, 21) and Valladolid (Arco de Ladrillo, 21).
Ecologists in Action has explained that the high differences between measuring stations in cities with similar populations is due to the “poor location of many supposedly traffic-oriented stations”, which are not located in the “critical points of pollution, as established by the new regulations”. According to the NGO, this means that the measurements are not “representative” of air quality in cities with lower NO2 levels or other medium-sized cities that do not even have traffic-oriented stations, as Ecologistas en Acción claims to have demonstrated in measurement campaigns it has carried out in recent years.
The organisation has once again called for policies to improve air quality in order to reduce the presence of cars in our urban areas. In particular, it insisted that local councils implement “effective” Low Emission Zones (LEZs). Given that two years have passed since the deadline for the 150 municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to set up LEZs and barely twenty cities have implemented them, the NGO has also called on the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility to ask the “offenders” to return the abundant European funds received for this purpose. In addition, Ecologistas en Acción has called for a review of the location of official air quality monitoring stations in Spanish cities, to adapt them to the new legal criteria for their location.
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