Heavily congested Brixton Road takes the dubious honour of being the first road in London to breach annual air pollution limits in 2017 – narrowly taking the title from Putney High Street who ‘won’ last year.
Readings taken at an air quality monitoring station show that the air people are breathing as they walk along Brixton Road has already breached the annual pollution limits for the entire year.
Under EU law there should be no more than 18 occasions a year when people are exposed to levels higher than 200 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide per cubic metre over the course of an hour.
The World Health Organisation recommends no one is ever exposed to this level of pollution.
Caroline Russell said:
“Just a week into the new year and residents in Brixton are already being exposed to illegal levels of air pollution. It’s a public health catastrophe and needs an urgent response.
“Too many people have had their lives shortened, their asthma and other respiratory problems worsened and their quality of life reduced as a result of weak Mayoral policies and Government inaction.
“The Mayor promised to restore London’s air quality to legal and safe limits, he has a lot of work to do to turn around his predecessor’s hopeless record on air pollution and come up with new measures to reduce Londoners’ exposure to polluted air.
“The ‘T’ charge is just not enough, the Mayor must clean up all the buses, cut traffic and make it safe and easy to walk and cycle.
“London must comply with nitrogen dioxide legal limits by 2020 at the very latest, people are already suffering the awful public health consequences of living in this dirty air.”
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution is produced by road traffic and has been linked to childhood asthma, dementia and a whole host of health problems for Londoners.
NO2 is deemed to be harmful to human health and the EU permits an annual limit of no more than 18 hours per year above an average concentration of 200 ug/m3. This year, by 5 January, Brixton Road had already exceeded this number of hours.
Kings College London, which runs the air quality monitoring stations, says that some London streets have the highest levels of NO2 exposure in the world.
Notes to editors
1. London Air Quality Network – Kings College London. Shows live monitoring of Brixton Road pollution: http://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/advgraphssiteplot.asp?CBXSpecies2=NO2m&day1=1&month1=jan&year1=2017&day2=14&month2=jan&year2=2017&period=hourly&graphtype=Java&Submit=replot+the+graph&site=LB4&res=6&cm-djitdk-djitdk=
Brixton Road air monitoring station is one of a hundred Air Quality Network stations located across London.
2. EU Limit Values for NO2 from the EU Air Quality Directive 50/2008, Table 1.1, Mayor’s Air Quality Strategy, December 2010, Clearing the Air
http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Air_Quality_Strategy_v3.pdf