WHO can you count on?

Exceedingly bad air

As promised last week, we have some updated data visualisations that we have been working on. The main changes are to show the counts and charts of daily exceedances of the WHO guidelines for daily PM2.5 and NO2 limits, making it easier to count exactly how many times the thresholds were breached. We thought it would be interesting to look at data from a topical location: the London Borough of Bromley.

Bromley has been in the news recently because the council have been granted a judicial review of the Mayor's planned expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). The council has stated that they have an "excellent record in this regard [clean air]". But what does the data say?

There is a Breathe London node located at the Bethlam Royal Hospital which has been generating data since July 2022. Let's have a look at the data, starting with daily breaches.

Quite a few daily breaches of PM2.5 and NO2

There have been 29 and daily breaches of WHO guidelines for PM2.5 levels and 107 breaches of NO2 levels in the past 11 months. This doesn't strike us as an excellent record on air quality.

PM2.5 (left) and NO2 (right) concentration heatmaps

Looking at the hourly and weekly patterns for NO2 shows a trend seen elsewhere: levels are higher during the morning and evening commutes, and lower at the weekends. At the recent book launch of Sadiq Khan’s book Breathe, several members of the audience were claiming that harmful air pollution was not from vehicles. This data would suggest otherwise.

ICYMI

We’ve hit the big time! Our work, and that of other Breathe London groups, is featured in Air Quality News. We thought it was a great article, dealing with why people might be sceptical about monitoring, or disengaged from the data, and the role of well-planned community monitoring to supplement the more established monitoring network. The publication also includes an interesting article about progress of Ella’s Law, or the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill, which we’ll be watching with interest.

Elsewhere in parliament, the Environmental Audit Committee have been taking evidence for their inquiry on air pollution: it’s a long listen (put it on while on your daily walk ;)) but included top experts covering data and targets, links to poor health, evidence on traffic reduction schemes, links to climate change and many other important topics. A slightly easier watch was this engaging video launched for Clean Air Day, featuring doctors and pharmacists from around the country talking through air pollution. Maybe we should launch on TikTok soon!