A year of some bright spots and many shadows. That is how Legambiente describes 2023 in the study Mal'aria di città, on air pollution in Italy.
A year of some bright spots and many shadows. That is how the environmental organisation Legambiente describes 2023 in the latest edition of Mal'aria di città, the study that takes stock of air pollution in Italy's provincial capitals. Looking at the values for particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides (NO2), an improvement on 2022 is indeed apparent. But with two big "buts". First and foremost, the fall in smog is essentially the result of favourable weather conditions, not of policies adopted by the state and local authorities. Moreover, there are still 18 Italian cities (out of the 98 monitored) that exceeded the PM10 limit for more than 35 days in a year. If the thresholds set for 2030 were to come into force today, the majority of cities would be in breach.
What stands out is the fact that as many as 18 Italian cities out of the 98 monitored exceeded 50 μg/mc of PM10 for more than 35 days per year, thereby breaching the regulations. The worst is Frosinone, with 70 days of exceedance recorded at the Frosinone scalo monitoring station; but Turin (66 days), Treviso (63), Mantova, Padova and Venice (62) are not much better. As Legambiente is keen to point out, however, these peak moments are only indicative up to a certain point, because they are heavily influenced by weather conditions.
Looking at annual averages, it emerges that all Italian cities are in line with air pollution regulations, which set thresholds of 40 micrograms per cubic metre for PM10 and NO2 respectively, and 25 μg/mc for PM2.5. The data, however, have remained substantially stable over the past five years: only for nitrogen dioxide are falling levels observed in several cities.
We can therefore say that air pollution in Italian cities is improving. But it is an improvement that is still very slow. Too slow, given that what is at stake is people's health. In 2021 the World Health Organisation introduced new parameters, far more stringent; and the European Union has in the meantime undertaken a revision of the air quality directive.
If the new limits proposed by the European institutions for 2030 were to come into force now, only 30 Italian cities out of 98 would comply with those for PM10 (20 μg/mc as an annual average), 14 out of 87 with those for PM2.5 (10 μg/mc as an annual average) and 45 out of 91 with those for NO2 (20 μg/mc as an annual average). If the current data are compared instead with the WHO guidelines, the percentages fall even further: seven cities comply with the recommended values for NO2, one (L'Aquila) with those for PM10, and none with those for PM2.5.
