We breathe much better in Europe than before -

JEANNE ACCORSINI / SIPA

Smile, you are breathing.

Air quality has improved significantly in Europe over the past ten years but scores of Europeans continue to die prematurely from pollution, the European Environment Agency (EEA) noted in a report on Monday. .

Air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to the health of Europeans, causing fatal respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, the study said.

Over the last ten years studied (2009-2018), the number of deaths due to the main pollutants has mostly fallen.

Air, it's just a matter of survival

In the Europe-28 (EU and United Kingdom), the EEA notes that the number of deaths linked to fine particles PM 2.5 (particles suspended in the air with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers) thus fell from 417,000 in 2009 to 379,000 in 2018. For nitrogen dioxide (NO2) alone, a gas produced mainly by vehicles and thermal power stations, premature deaths have fallen by around 54% over the last decade from 117,000 to 54,000. 

Since the beginning of the 2000s, emissions of the main atmospheric pollutants, in particular nitrogen oxides (NOx) have decreased considerably in Europe, recalls the agency based in Copenhagen.

A black point, however: for ozone particles (O3), the trend is upwards with 19,400 premature deaths in 2018, an increase of 24% since 2009.

Fairly light standards

"Improving air quality thanks to climate and environmental policies is good news, but all good news has its downside and we cannot ignore that the number of premature deaths is still far too high", underlined the European Commissioner for the Environment, Virginijus Sinkevičius, quoted in the report.

In 2018, 34% of inhabitants in urban areas still breathed ozone particles higher than European standards.

The European criteria are less stringent than those of the World Health Organization, according to which 99% of the inhabitants of the EU breathed ozone particles higher than the recommendations.

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