Articles
Theme
According to the United Nations everyone on the planet has a right to a healthy environment, including clean air. Still, air pollution continues to negatively impact human health, Europe’s nature and biodiversity, damaging agricultural crops, natural vegetation, historical buildings and monuments.
Each year in the EU over 400,000 people die prematurely as a result of breathing toxic air.
In 2022, ECAS and partners crowdsourced the ideas of thousands of citizens from 10 European cities on how to improve air.
The ECAS-event “Love is in the Air! Improving Air Quality in Europe through Citizen Action” will present the main problems with air quality identified by citizens in their cities, their proposals for solutions and top priorities for environmental action on local, national and European level.
REGISTER TO THE EVENT HERE BELOW!
This event will start by welcoming Minister Alain Maron to explain his upcoming environmental and democratic plans for Brussels. ECAS will hand over to him the citizens’ top priorities for the improvement of air quality.
The following two panels will provide a forum to experts on air quality issues and campaigners in the European cities to discuss how citizens’ recommendations could become a reality and what are the lessons learnt on ensuring a more collaborative decision-making.
Agenda and Speakers
10.00 Welcome from Gilles Pelayo, Head of Unit, EACEA, European Commission
10.10 Alain Maron, Minister of the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region, responsible for Climate Change, Environment, Energy and Participatory Democracy
10.20 Citizen Handover of Air Quality Proposals to Minister Alain Maron
10.30 Panel 1: Enhancing Air Quality in Brussels and Europe – What is the state of play and what are the plans for the future?
Moderated by Elisa Lironi, Programme Director-European Democracy, ECAS
- Prof. Dr. Catherine Bouland, Présidente de l’Ecole de Santé Publique de l’ULB and Directrice du centre de recherche en santé environnementale et santé au travail
- Pierre Dornier, President, Chercheurs d’Air
- Geoffrey Usé, Conseiller politique mobilités, Ecolo
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Lieselotte Gevens, Mobilité & Environnement, BRAL – Brussels’ urban movement, Co-initiator of CurieuzenAir.
Q&A with participants
11.30 Coffee Break
11.45 Panel 2: Can Citizen Participation Improve Policy-Making in Europe? – Lessons Learnt from Crowdsourcing Solutions for Tackling Air Pollution in Cities.
Moderated by Andreas Müller, Managing Director, Democracy International, Germany
- Petko Georgiev, Director, ProInfo, Bulgaria
- Liia Hanni, Senior Expert on e-Democracy, E-Governance Academy, Estonia
- Amina Murić, Deputy Director, Civic Alliance, Montenegro
- Tessel Renzenbrink, Co-Director, NetDem, The Netherlands
Q&A with participants
12.55 Concluding remarks
13.00 Lunch Buffet
*The meeting will be held in English.
Download the Agenda as a PDF.
London - The Super Sewer
Samantha Freelove is Legacy & Sustainability Manager at Thames Tideway Tunnel, the company responsible for the construction of the Super Sewer in London. The city is currently building a huge tunnel underneath the city to stop the sewage overflows to the Thames by 2025. The tunnel will be able to hold a volume of 1,6 million m³ of water during rain events to reduce the volume of sewage overflows by 95%. Today, London discharges the astronomical yearly volume of 110 million m³ of polluted water in the Thames. In 2025, this will be reduced to 5 million m³ per year. The enormous project with a price tag of 5 billion euro will safeguard the natural environment from pollution and will protect the health of the citizens who use the river for recreation.
Watch the video for London on YouTube: Samantha Freelove - The Super Sewer in London.
Copenhagen - Cloudburst Management Plan
“It was difficult, but it has been done”, with these words Lykke Leonardsen, Head Director Resilient and Sustainable City Solutions at the city of Copenhagen, describes how they developed the Cloudburst Management Plan together with all actors and citizens. It became an ambitious 1,6 billion plan for urban rainwater management and it was initiated after a huge flood in the city in 2011. 350 different projects throughout the whole city will protect the city against floods in the future. Several parks become rain parks, streets become rain streets and at the end of the line some tunnels will lead the water underneath the city center into the harbor. The beautiful part of the plan is that Copenhagen uses it as an opportunity to create new quality public spaces for the citizens on top of the extra green areas. The execution of the plan is well underway and will take up to 20 to 30 years.
Watch the video for Copenhagen on YouTube:Lykke Leonardsen - Cloudburst Management Plan - Copenhagen.
Paris - Swimming in the Seine by 2024
When Jacques Chirac was president of France, he promised that the Seine would be swimmable by the end of his term. He clearly wasn’t able to fulfill his promise, but Anita Ravlic from the city of Paris explains how the city will make this a reality by 2024. Today, 2 million m³ of polluted sewage water per year flows to the river through the sewage overflows. To reduce this to zero, they developed a plan with a price tag of 1,2 billion euro. Part of the plan is the construction of a stormwater basin underneath the Square Marie Curie with a volume of 50.000 m³, the last stormwater basin of the city. In 2024, several of the Olympic swimming disciplines will be organized in the river and in 2025 swimming in the river must be accessible for everybody. This comes on top of the already existing swimming infrastructure in the Villette Basin.
Watch the video of Paris on YouTube: Anita Ravlic - Swimming in the Seine by 2024 - Paris.
Brussels - Brussels Environment, Vivaqua and Hydria
Michael Antoine from Brussels Environment, Olivier Pireyn from Vivaqua and Boud Verbeiren from Hydria paint the Brussels water landscape, explain how they will adapt the existing overflow infrastructure and which study they are currently conducting to potentially use the Belliard stormwater basin in a dynamical way to reduce the sewage overflows. The questions asked by the public revealed a sorrow point of the Brussels plans, there is no calculated objective for a specific moment in time to reduce the 10 million m³ of sewage water discharged yearly in the Senne and the canal. Where the other cities have ambitious short-term plans, Brussels is looking at the problem at a much longer term and step by step.
Watch the video of Brussels on YouTube: Brussels Environment, Vivaqua and Hydria - Current and future projects
You can find more pictures of the event on https://www.canalitup.org/en/after-the-conference/.
A procedure already ongoing for seven years
Originally, Belgium, like all other European countries, was supposed to provide air quality that met the minimum standards agreed upon at the European level by 2010. Because the air quality in Belgium was so poor, our country was exceptionally given time until 2015. But even in 2015, air quality was still substandard - especially in Brussels and Antwerp. That is why the European Commission launched an infringement procedure in 2016, which is still ongoing today.
According to several Belgian NGOs, the protracted procedure is to the detriment of the health of Belgians who are not served by a procedure that has already lasted seven years.
"The European Commission can no longer let this matter run its course and must take urgent action," said Inge Salden of the Antwerp-based action group Recht op Lucht.
Last year, this group released a scientific report showing that even in 2021, European standards were not met everywhere in Antwerp (1).
Elsewhere in Belgium, air quality also exceeds these standards in some places, as shown by the Irceline models (2). In Brussels, the CurieuzenAir project showed that 1.4% of Brussels residents are still exposed to illegal air quality (3).
An Macharis, from the Citizenne organization, said: "Taking some fresh air is simply impossible in our neighborhood".
Their organization is located on the Brussels ring road, where the highest NO2 concentration was measured during the CurieuzenAir project.
"Our lungs deserve better"
That Belgium still does not meet current standards is hallucinatory. Indeed, European countries are currently discussing new rules on air quality. Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission, has repeatedly warned that the rules will become stricter. "This is a good thing," says Tim Cassiers of BRAL, a member organization of HEAL, a European alliance of organizations working for the environment and health. (4) This coalition recently launched a petition (5) to urge the European institutions to base the new standards on the latest medical and scientific knowledge. They have already collected over 125,000 signatures.
It is the elderly and children, those whose health is fragile, who pay with their health the price of poor air quality in Europe. Just recently, the European Environment Agency announced that 1,200 children in Europe die every year from the effects of air pollution (6).
Eurocommissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius must take responsibility
The organizations are calling on EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius to act more decisively. It is imperative that the EU enforce its own legislation to hold the Belgian government accountable for taking the necessary steps to improve air quality.
"The office of EU Commissioner Sinkevičius is located on Rue de la Loi, one of the most unhealthy roads in Brussels. By enforcing its own legislation, the EU would also take responsibility for its own environment," said Tim Cassiers of BRAL.
Pierre, director of Chercheurs d'Air, concluded by saying: "Brussels, the capital of Belgium, but also of the EU, is the 8th most polluted city in Europe, in terms of nitrogen dioxide. This gas is very harmful to health. The European Commission must speed up the infringement procedure so that Belgium will seriously and quickly fulfill the task of protecting the health of its population from the risks of air pollution."
END
Note to editors
- The report of Recht op Lucht https://rechtoplucht.be/rapport-metingen-2021/
- The maps of Irceline https://www.irceline.be/fr/qualite-de-lair/mesures/dioxyde-dazote/history/no2_anmean_rioifdm
- The website of: Curieuzenair www.curieuzenair.brussels
- https://www.env-health.org/
- https://act.wemove.eu/campaigns/clean-air-now?utm_source=partner-HEAL
- https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/newsroom/news/air-pollution-levels-across-…
- Belgium presently doesn’t meet the requirements of Directive 2008/50/EC on ambient air quality and cleaner air for Europe.
Press contacts
- Inge Salden, Recht Op Lucht, contact@rechtoplucht.be, +32 496 30 96 88
- Tim Cassiers, BRAL, tim@bral.brussels, +32 476 44 92 23
- Pierre Dornier, Les Chercheurs d’Air, +32496815263
Coalition
BRAL, Chercheurs d’Air, Citizenne, Clean Cities Campaign, Fietsersbond, Filter Café Filtré Atelier, Recht op Lucht
Here you can find pictures of the action: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1_xTOg78HHNzK_FIBSm5pPGPpagScGJ3D
Does soil play a role at all, or is it just a piece of the world we build on, excavate and drain, or walk, cycle, drive on, ... without looking at it? If it is about soil at all, it is mostly about polluted soil. About what doesn't belong in it, and therefore needs to be cleaned up.
On the other hand, we see far less reflection on living soil, as an essential part of our living environment. Or so we thought. Super Terram has taught us how many people and initiatives there are for whom soil is important. This 'bottin' is a reflection of that, it shows the multitude of ideas out there.
What does soil teach us about the limits of our way of urban planning? Where do we 'negotiate' with the nature around us, and what does that mean in practice when you want to change a piece of the city?
Super Terram is a research and collective experiment to learn how far we can go to translate insights about the relationship man and soil into the institutions and practices that make the city. Such thinking is important and has very concrete repercussions in the city.
Consider the developments at the Josaphat site, where a piece of nature has developed unforeseen; where a living soil has formed. Unforeseen development .... Is there still room for it in today's city? And what about a site like Schaerbeek-Formation, where we have the opportunity to design economic developments in concert with a living soil?
These kinds of questions and reflections also immediately make it clear that the end of Super Terram as it existed until now does not mean the end of working around living soil in the city.
Raf Pauly
To reinforce its team, CityTools is looking for a “Participation and community outreach collaborator”, or a social worker with an affinity for urban and/or architectural issues, or an architect or sociologist with concrete experience of contacts with actors on the ground.
Read more about the vacancy in the attachment.