Urban Air Quality: Challenges and future directions

Urban air quality (AQ) is impacted by different emission sources (traffic, household heating, industry, energy production,...) and inhabitants are exposed to different pollutants that have impact on their health. Some pollutants, e.g. traffic-related ones (like UFP, BC & NOx), can show a very high spatial and temporal variability within a city or neighbourhood.

There is a need to better understand the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of AQ and at the same time understand levels of pollutants of emerging concern; this information is crucial for improved assessment of health effects and data-driven policy.

The new AQD (2024/2881) sets stricter requirements for  regulated pollutants and requires the monitoring of emerging pollutants at so-called supersites (in urban areas). The purpose is to collect data on pollutants of emerging concern to improve understanding of health and environmental impacts. On the other hand, new (low-cost) monitoring devices can complement regulatory Air Quality Monitoring Stations (AQMS) and  can collect data at multiple locations in urban areas (via stationary networks or mobile deployment). Whereas new monitoring approaches can result in insights on spatial variability across the city, there are still some issues related data quality of low-cost sensors or representativity of mobile mapping.

The recently finished RI-URBANS project (https://riurbans.eu/), provides data on emerging pollutants in different cities in Europe and introduced new methods e.g. to collect fine-grained pollution maps. Within the on-going Net4Cities project (https://www.net4cities.eu/), datasets of emerging pollutants at multiple locations in 11 cities (including UFP, LDSA, ammonia, VOCs) will become available.

In this presentation, challenges related to urban air quality monitoring in (European) cities will be discussed. New monitoring approaches to better understand urban AQ and levels of emerging pollutants will be discussed. Some examples will be given on how innovative monitoring can contribute to improved policy and cleaner cities.