Future Trends in Air Pollution

The face of air pollution will inevitably change over the course of time. In general, the important driving forces of air pollution, such as population growth, economic development, increased energy consumption and higher agricultural production, are expected to aggravate throughout the world in the coming decades. Additionally, societies have begun to be concerned about the impairment of their living conditions due to poor air quality and have started to take measures to control emissions. Thus, many of the present local and regional air quality problems will improve in the future, especially in industrialised countries. However, we have little reason to assume that these traditional air quality problems will disappear altogether. Overall, the presently decided control measures do not appear to be sufficient to reach environmentally sustainable conditions in industrialised countries. In the developing world the combined effect of higher pollution levels, caused by the fast economic development and increased population, could lead to unprecedented levels of air pollution damage. To what extent their air quality will be kept at acceptable levels will depend on the preparedness of the societies in developing countries to allocate sufficient resources for air pollution control. Powerful technologies for controlling emissions are on the market, and many developing nations have taken the first steps to limit air pollution, at least for the worst polluted places. While we might be modestly optimistic that local pollution hotspots will eventually be under control, there is reason for concern about the increasing levels of global background air pollution. Current background concentrations alone exceed in many cases the sustainable levels, and their continuing growth counteracts the effectiveness of local and regional emission control efforts.JRC.H.2-Climate chang