Ireland's State of the Environment Report 2024

40 Chapter 2: Air 2. Air quality standards in Ireland 1 Directive 2008/50/EC on ambient air quality and cleaner air for Europe (CAFE Directive) and Directive 2004/107/EC relating to arsenic, cadmium, nickel and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ambient air. European directives on air quality and emissions The EU zero pollution targets for 2030 include a reduction of more than 55% in the number of premature deaths across Europe as an indicator of the overall reduced health impacts of air pollution. The EU’s comprehensive Clean Air Policy (EC, 2018) is based on three pillars: ambient air quality standards, national emission reduction targets and emission standards for key sources of pollution. Collectively, these pillars combine to tackle air pollution and achieve the EU’s zero pollution vision for 2050 (EC, 2021) including the 2030 target. Emission standards are used in the regulation of industry and the power generation sector. Industrial Emissions Directive (2010/75/EU) licences, which are granted and enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), work to curb emissions from industry and the power generation sector in Ireland. Installations with a power generation capacity of 50 MWth (thermal input) and above are covered by this directive. The Medium Combustion Plant Directive ((EU) 2015/2193), applies to installations with on-site combustion plants with a rated thermal input capacity of 1-50 MWth. To continue to ensure that industrial facilities do not affect the quality of air in the surrounding environment, industrial emissions of pollutants to air are controlled. Industry’s impact on the environment is discussed in Chapter 13. Ambient air quality directives European ambient air quality legislation sets out concentration limits for 13 air pollutants that have impacts on human health and on vegetation. 1 These pollutants are NO 2 , particulate matter (both particulate matter < 10 μm (PM 10 ) and PM 2.5 ), O 3 , sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ), benzene, lead, carbon monoxide (CO), arsenic, cadmium, nickel and benzo(a)pyrene. The relevant directives include the Cleaner Air For Europe (CAFE) Directive and one current daughter directive, the fourth daughter directive. When a Member State does not meet the standards in the directives, it must prepare an air quality plan to ensure compliance in future. The EU ambient air quality directives have been subject to a review since 2022. This review is substantially informed by the revised WHO air quality guidelines (Topic Box 2.1). At the time of writing, this review was at the end stage of the EU’s approval process. The proposed CAFE Directive sets out to move Europe’s air quality standards towards the health-based WHO guideline limits in a stepwise manner. Its new provisions include tighter limits on air pollutants, including new air pollutants such as ultrafine particles and black carbon, and a strengthened regime for Member States’ air quality plans when new limits have not been met. Innovatively, it obliges Member States to put in place air quality roadmaps when they anticipate future issues with complying with the revised air quality standards. This means that action needs to be taken proactively rather than waiting until a standard has been breached. The roadmaps are intended to set out the steps to ensure compliance when potential breaches of standards are considered likely. Topic Box 2.1 WHO air quality guidelines Based on extensive scientific evidence, the WHO sets human health-based guideline limits for pollutants in ambient air. In 2021, it issued a new set of guidelines (WHO, 2021), the first global update since 2005. The guidelines reflect the growing volume of understanding and medical evidence showing the impacts of air pollutants at increasingly lower concentrations. The guidelines cover the pollutants most critical for health, i.e. for which the evidence for health effects arising from exposure has advanced in the past 15 years. Based on the evidence, they provide recommendations on air quality guideline limits for key air pollutants: PM 2.5 and PM 10 , O 3 , NO 2 , SO 2 and CO. The 2021 guideline limits are significantly lower for particulate matter and NO 2 . WHO also included interim targets to guide reduction efforts towards achieving the air quality guideline limits (Figure 2.3). According to WHO, meeting the interim targets could have a notable benefit for health, especially in those regions where exposure far exceeds the interim targets.