Revised EU and WHO air quality thresholds: Where does Europe stand?

Abstract

One year after the new WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines were published, the European Commission proposed revisions to the Ambient Air Quality Directives, seeking to align European Union air quality standards more closely with WHO recommendations. Here, we employed Bayesian geostatistical regression models to estimate at 1km2 spatial resolution the number of Europeans that would be currently exposed to levels above the new suggested thresholds for the three most harmful pollutants, namely PM2.5, PM10, and NO2. The results have shown that in 2021, 97.6% (95% credible interval: 95.1, 99.2%) of the total European population was exposed to PM2.5 levels exceeding the new WHO annual limit values, while 47.5% (36.2, 59.5%) lived in areas where the revised EU thresholds were exceeded. For PM10, the proportion of people exposed to concentrations above the WHO annual thresholds was estimated at 62.5% (54.0, 70.9%) and at 29.6 (21.9, 37.0%) above the EU values, whereas for NO2, the estimates were at 67.4% (57.9, 75.8%) and 20.2% (13.3, 28.5%), respectively. Our high-resolution model-based predictions are readily available to support policy makers and scientists working toward achieving the ambitious European zero-pollution vision for 2050.