Informe El medio ambiente en Europa: Estado y perspectivas 2020

PART 2
FIGURE 8.5
%
100
EU urban population exposed to air pollutant concentrations above selected WHO air quality
guidelines
80
60
40
20
0
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
PM 2.5
PM 10
O 3
NO 2
Source:
EEA (2019g).
EU-28 urban population. Considering
the EU legal standards, up to almost
20 % of the EU‐28 urban population still
lives in areas where at least one of the
standards is exceeded (EEA, 2019g).
It is anticipated that the commitments
to reduce air pollutant emissions by
2030 under the revised NEC Directive
(Figure 8.2) will result in a reduction
in the population exposed to PM 2.5
concentrations above the WHO guideline
to around 13 % by 2030, and in most of
those locations the exceedances will be
small enough to be addressed by local
measures (Amann et al., 2018b).
The latest estimations indicate that
exposure to PM 2.5
is responsible for
around 400 000 premature deaths
in Europe every year (EEA, 2019b).
Exposure to NO 2
and O 3
were
responsible for around 70 000 and
15 000 premature deaths in 2017,
respectively. These calculations are
made for individual pollutants
without taking into account that
pollution is a mix of all of them and
concentrations are in some cases
correlated. Therefore, the impacts
cannot simply be aggregated, as this
may result in double counting of
the effects (EEA, 2019b). The impacts of
air pollution may also be expressed in
terms of years of life lost ( 1 ).
Map 8.2 shows years of life lost
per 100 000 inhabitants (as a way
of normalising the numbers and
making countries easily comparable
independently of their size and
population) in 2016 for PM 2.5
. The
largest relative impacts are observed
in the central and eastern European
countries where the highest
concentrations are also observed,
i.e. ordered by relative impacts, Kosovo
(under UNSCR 1244/99), Serbia,
Bulgaria, Albania and North Macedonia.
The detailed data for each country,
together with the impacts of NO 2
and
O 3
, can be found in the EEA’s report on
air quality in Europe (EEA, 2019b).
( 1 ) Years of life lost (YLL) are defined as the years of potential life lost due to premature death. YLL is an estimate of the number of years that people
in a population would have lived had there been no premature deaths. The YLL measure takes into account the age at which deaths occur and
therefore the contribution to the total is greater for a death occurring at a young age than that for a death occurring at an older age (EEA, 2018a).
SOER 2020/Air pollution
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