Photo: Smog in Warsaw
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | FEBRUARY 19th 2021
On Thursday, the European Union (EU) had announced that it would be proceeding with its plans to sue Slovakia for breaching the laws revolving around air pollution for several years now, alongside plenty of other countries.
Lawsuits are under way against Germany, Slovakia, Poland and Slovenia at the EU’s Court of Justice for having broken environmental laws, ranging from the poor overlook of air quality to the general failure of nature conservation, according to the European Commission. Slovakia is only the latest of the countries to be sued, and more proceedings may be on their way soon.
“We need a new political and social acceptance to clean the air of Slovakia and I am convinced that we will achieve that,” said Slovakian Environment Minister Jan Budaj, who expressed that there’s a strong need for local government to begin addressing the problem of air pollution more thoroughly, and with greater seriousness.
Legal limits on particulate matter -referring to the quality of air- had been set by Brussels all the way back in 2005, and have been considered a vital set of rules to follow for the purpose of prioritising the recovery of both human and environmental health.
According to the European Environment Agency, 379,000 deaths in the EU were linked to fine particulate air pollution in the year of 2018. Such instances will only continue if nothing is done about the crisis – in fact, number may only see a rise.
A high rate of air pollution in a country can very easily be connected to numerous cardiovascular diseases, the development of respiratory conditions such as asthma or otherwise, and even something as severe as lung cancer.
Slovakia had been taken to court by the EU for having breached these legal limits on particulate matter for every single year, from 2005-2019 except for in 2016 in a specific mountainous region called the Banskobystricky kraj. The commission had added that the Slovakian city of Kosice had been particularly bad on this count, having breached the set limits for every year except 2015 and 2016.
According to previously-published PM 2.5 data by IQAir AirVisual, Slovakia had been ranked 40th in terms of the top most polluted countries in the world. Out of all these, Slovakia is known to have the 10th worst air quality in Europe, the report adds. This makes the need for improvement an extreme necessity, one that cannot go on ignored much longer.
