Ib-airian updates

We’re in Spain this week (Catalonia) so we would usually go full-on travel blog. But sadly the story is a bit of a re-run of last time: hire electric car, then faff around endlessly trying to find functioning charging points, while admiring the excellent cycling infrastructure! Been there, done that!.. Not much seems to have changed in three years and this time we got a smaller car so the faff has been even more extreme.

So instead we thought we would look at what is going on in the world of air pollution across Europe. Starting with Spain, it was great to see the Breathe Cities announcement about expansion to Madrid (as well as Addis Ababa), taking the total to 16 world cities. We’ve covered Breathe Cities regularly in this blog - an international initiative supported by C40 Cities, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Clean Air Fund to help city authorities take action and learn from each other. For example, Madrid has recently implemented a Low Emission Zone, which hopefully will show the improvements to air quality that London’s has offered. We will need to plan a trip to investigate!

From Spain to France, the story of Paris is key to understand how air pollution policies are developing. Anne Hidalgo, who stepped down as Mayor of Paris earlier this year, was known for huge efforts to reduce traffic pollution in particular - by supporters and detractors alike. London and Paris always like to compete, and the improvements in air quality in both are impressive! However, Louise was in Paris for the Vivatech conference in June and was still recording pretty high pollution levels for the start-up run along the Seine, even in the early hours.

Perhaps we’ll dive into a certain other ex-Mayor’s record and look at Manchester again another time - a less positive story (!) But one thing that’s currently uniting these geographies is of course the wildfires near to Manchester, in France (including places we’ve visited over the past two years) and near to Madrid. For Madrid, an air quality warning was put out, but in Manchester, Mums for Lungs has been highlighting that no, or limited health warnings have been raised.

One pan-European announcement that caught our eye was the creation of a Clean Tech for Clean Air coalition, including Spain-based Kunak, Polish Airly, US-based Clarity Movement, and two with whom we are less familiar - Ecomeasure and Ellona. We were particularly (and pleasantly) surprised after the public spat between two of them about Breathe London sensors. The impetus behind the announcement seems to be the need for EU member states to start implementing the Ambient Air Quality Directive. This is arguably one of the most progressive air pollution legal framework globally, so work to get it implemented is key.

Just to round things off, our Spain visit hasn’t just been dominated by EV charging. At the weekend we joined a slightly terrifying local festival - correfoc, which literally means ‘run with fire’ in Catalan. While the memories will mainly be the panic for us and the children as firework sparks rained down, there may have been an impact on air quality the next day with our run showing high levels of particulate matter (we could still smell it in the air.. or perhaps we mean our hair!)

However, the run a few days later was still pretty high on particulate matter - either there is just a lot at this time of year (quite likely) or the after effect from the fireworks the night before. Yes, we are definitely in party town!