Yesterday, the Government of the Generalitat, the town councils and councils, the social agents and the managers of infrastructures such as ports and airports signed the Agreement to Improve Air Quality in Catalonia. A specific schedule of commitments to reduce by 15% the emissions of gases and particles that most directly affect health by 2025 (with perfectly quantified impacts on respiratory diseases in the youngest children and the reduction in life expectancy of elderly) is an essential instrument to try to recover the accumulated delay in compliance with European guidelines. The most notable measure is the establishment of Low Emission Zones (banned from the most polluting vehicles) in all municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, when Spanish regulations only make them mandatory for those with more than 50,000 inhabitants. This implies that, in addition to the five cities already included in the metropolitan ZBE (Barcelona, L’Hospitalet, Sant Adrià, Cornellà and Esplugues), another 62 Catalan municipalities will have to delimit areas in which this measure is applied. The ‘consellera’ of Climate Action, Teresa Jordanalso promised to approve a Catalan law on air quality within this legislature: in this calendar we are already late, and there is no room for further delay.
Nothing contained in the pact is very different from the proposals and initiatives undertaken in recent years by the Barcelona City Council. On the contrary, Barcelona clearly appears as advanced in the policies now included in the roadmap that the Government assumes for the entire territory: application of the ZBE; where they are not enough, a veto of central areas to road traffic; expansion of the bike lane network; promotion of forms of sustainable mobility; rationalization of car use; increase in the frequency of public transport…
Barcelona’s pioneering position in this process has meant that its government team has made mistakes but has also received criticism that in some cases time has been putting in its place. Bearing in mind that some of them have come from the parties that make up the Catalan Executive or the government of the provincial councils, it would be somewhat logical that they would not make a battle horse of measures that at the same time they defend for the country as a whole (although with elections municipal councils in the offing might be too much to ask). Others have come from entities and economic agents that can be expected to maintain them when equivalent actions are undertaken by other administrations.
The pact includes a reinforcement of the diagnosis and detection network of contamination in urban areas, and links some of the measures to an objective evaluation of their results. And while it is true that, according to municipal data, the ZBE already in force has led to the reduction of more than 600,000 daily trips, the evaluations of what has been the reduction of pollution do not offer unequivocally positive results. Beyond principled positions, it is not possible to rule out the possibility that some dissuasive measures for urban traffic by putting obstacles on it do not fulfill their objective but rather increase vehicle routes (and end up having a neutral effect on emissions). The restrictive measures that must inevitably continue to be taken must always be subject to review based on its fulfillment of unavoidable objectives, whether we think of the health of people or the planet.