Air quality: a good indicator of environmental policies
Audio 19:30
Despite slight improvements, the air in European countries is still very polluted, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.
© GettyImages / Jean-François Monnot / EyeEm
By: Juliette Gheerbrant Follow
2 min
Despite slight improvements, the air in European countries is still very polluted.
This pollution caused 417,000 premature deaths in 2018, according to the European Environment Agency, and the pollutants released by industry cost the continent between 280 and 430 billion euros per year in damages on the health and the environment.
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The Agency has also published a ranking of the cities where we breathe the best.
At the bottom of the list, there are cities in Poland or the Po plain in Italy.
And at the very top is the town of Umeå, almost 100,000 inhabitants,
in northern Sweden
.
The clean air of Umeå is the result of a
very comprehensive
environmental policy
as shown in this report by
Frédéric Faux
.
Northern Europe is rightly known to be far ahead on environmental issues.
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, was designated the European Union's green capital in 2023
.
But here are too many cars, projects which do not see the light of day ...
Critics are fired
following this appointment.
The explanations of our correspondent in the Baltic countries,
Marielle Vitureau.
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.
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(RE-BROADCAST)
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