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FROM CRISIS POLICY FORUM, A PROJECT OF CASAVARIA'S THINK INITIATIVE 19 September 2007 Barcelona, a city often thought to be a bastion of liberal thought and green politics (the Green party is part of the regional coalition government), is listed one of the worst cities for air quality in Europe, according to La Vanguardia newspaper and CREAL, a Barcelona-based research institute. The city and the region are dealing with a sometimes unmanageable influx of new inhabitants and tourist activity, which have produced soaring demand for transportation, air travel, electricity and new construction. It depends greatly what sort of particulate matter is being examined and what environmental conditions make specific levels more or less harmful to a given population (wind patterns, humidity, etc.). London, for instance, is known for the black soot that accumulates on white clothes or in newcomers' nostrils, and Manila in the hottest time of year can give the impression of smoke-filled air. Anecdotes about visitors to Mexico City having to be hospitalized for respiratory problems are by now cliché. None of these are true of Barcelona, but the city does have a problem with industrial dust and carbon-molecules related to transport. As are London, Manila and Mexico City, Barcelona has taken some small steps toward preventing such contaminants from overtaking the city, but the city now clearly faces a serious challenge in overcoming what is part of a global trend in the conflict between economic and environmental policy. Lists of the world's most polluted cities or of places with the worst air quality are numerous, and use varying measures to determine their findings. The World Bank, for instance, lists China has home to 20 of the 30 worst-polluted cities in the world. While the recently published Blacksmith Institute study of the world's most polluted places (not strictly air quality, but general contamination) not only does not include Barcelona in the top ten, it lists no Western European or North American cities in the "dirty thirty". The world is facing a major environmental crisis, with multiple serious battles to fight on various fronts, if we are to avert crippling long-term environmental degradation. One fundamental problem is that post-industrial societies have not sufficiently divorced their economic activity from extreme contaminants like carbon-based fuels, so that special cases of exorbitant economic growth continue to bring with them high levels of particulate air pollution. Barcelona, with a liberal government and policies designed to make its bus system less emissions intensive, congestion taxing on cars and a vast public transport network, has been listed not as one of the most polluted cities in the world, but as having on average across the metropolitan area the 8th worst concentration of particulate matter small enough to be ingested by respiration, out of a limited survey of 26 cities worldwide. Part of the reason is that the city has, despite its reputation as a progressive political stronghold, never implemented the EU's caps on particulate-matter pollution. The regional government now says it seeks to meet those goals with a series of new initiatives, and that by 2010, the city will be able to prevent more than 1,000 deaths per year attributable to ailments derived from breathing high levels of pollutants. But part of the global problem tied to pollution is that cities, regions and nations that see intense economic expansion (Barcelona's tourism and real estate markets have expanded massively each year of this decade) tend to see an intensification of air pollution. Two years ago, China was listed as host to the 8 most polluted cities in the world, and 10 of the 15 most polluted. While it is not clear that Beijing has effectively reduced nationwide pollution, and we have numerous stories each year of chemical spills, contaminated waters flooding cropland, cover-ups of environmental degradation and the massive desertification of the country's northwest, it is true that playing host to the Olympic Games in 2008 has meant that strict measures are being taken to reduce the capital's epic levels of smog. We must ask ourselves: what policies can be implemented, rapidly and on national scales, to bring into practice environmentally sustainable industrial methods of production? And, what is needed to ensure that assistance and incentives are provided to cities and regions whose economic growth might not coincide with a political drive to clean up the air or regulate emissions? [s]
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