Scotford, E; (2020) Rethinking Clean Air: Air Quality Law and Covid-19. Journal of Environmental Law , 32 (3) pp. 349-353. 10.1093/jel/eqaa027.

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Abstract

Air quality has long been a serious health problem caused by industrialisation and urbanisation.1 It has also been a very difficult policy and regulatory problem to address.2 This is partly a problem of regulatory strategy—what suite of measures work together to reduce air pollution levels without simply displacing pollution? It is partly a problem of controlling individual behaviour—as a collective problem, many individual actions generate air pollution. It is partly a problem of policy priority—air quality is often traded off against economic progress. And it is partly a failure of governance—identifying the appropriate actors to govern air quality and ensuring they work in concert. It is also a matter of defining what is acceptable air quality in the first place, and expressing this in law. None of these issues had been resolved well before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The pandemic sheds these air quality law challenges in a new light. It is a public health crisis with many links to air quality, whether related to air pollution and its impacts on disease outcomes, or by examining the transmission pathways of COVID-19. Responding to the pandemic has involved bold regulatory experiments, heavily restricting behaviours, such as movements across transport networks, that are prime causes of urban nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution in particular. Above all, the pandemic has increased the profile of air quality as a social problem to address, creating a moment to rethink this problem and what we might do about it.

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