New plan to improve air quality in Birmingham launched

With less than two months to go until Birmingham’s Clean Air Zone launch, the City Council has published its Air Quality Action Plan 2021.

The new Plan will replace the Council’s previous Air Quality Action Plan 2011 and outline some key actions to improve Birmingham’s air quality between 2021-2026. They include:

• Promoting behaviour change away from single-occupancy private vehicle use through improving public transport. 
• Promoting the use of alternatively-fuelled vehicles to reduce both air pollution and carbon emissions from transport. 
• Providing the refuelling infrastructure to support private and personal decisions in choosing new modes of transportation and accessing grant funding to replace, upgrade or retrofit existing vehicles in key service areas.
• Using traffic management solutions to improve air quality by reducing numbers of cars, smoothing traffic flow or holding queues and congestion away from relevant exposure locations.

Birmingham City Council’s Head of the Clean Air Zone, Stephen Arnold, said: “Birmingham currently has unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide, and we know this has a detrimental effect on the health and life expectancy of our citizens.

The Clean Air Zone is a significant first step in tackling the issue of air quality, but – as this Plan has shown – other actions must be taken alongside its implementation if we are to make meaningful improvements.”

he Air Quality Action Plan also sets out a strategy for assessing air quality in key areas around the city, with an ambition to install six new air quality monitoring stations by December 2021. Further assessments will help identify areas of poor air quality in Birmingham and what appropriate action can be taken to improve them. 

More information and a direct download to the report is available on the Birmingham City Council website.