Pollution breeds with the poorest areas of the great European metropolises | Society

Pollution breeds with the poorest areas of the great European metropolises | Society


Pollution breeds with the most disadvantaged areas of the great European metropolises. This is confirmed by an international study published in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution after crossing the pollution rates and the socioeconomic indicators of several municipalities in the metropolitan area of ​​nine European cities. The research returns to focus on the complex phenomenon of environmental inequality in Europe, which has different conclusions within the scientific literature. This last study, nevertheless, advances in line with what the World Health Organization (WHO) has already announced in the whole of the planet: the most disadvantaged areas have poorer air quality.

"Higher levels of nitrogen dioxide are observed in the socioeconomically disadvantaged areas of European metropolises, which are reflected in the highest levels of population density, the population born outside the European Union, crime and unemployment rates" , says the recently published international study. The researchers analyzed the environmental inequalities in the conurbations of nine European cities: Athens, Barcelona, ​​Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Stockholm and Turin.

To carry out the study, the experts compiled various socioeconomic parameters such as the youth and the global unemployment rate, the rate of aging, the smoking rate, the population density, the crime or the level of education of the population, among other criteria, of the municipalities that make up the metropolitan areas of these cities. These data crossed them, in turn, with the nitrogen dioxide levels of these zones. In the case of Barcelona, ​​the environmental and socioeconomic information of 23 metropolitan municipalities was analyzed; Athens included 40; Paris, 150

"For all the metropolitan areas we separated the municipalities into four groups in each of the analyzed indicators. And we look at whether the group with the highest level of unemployment, for example, has a higher concentration of nitrogen dioxide, than municipalities that are at the lowest level of unemployment, "explains Marc Marí-Dell'Olmo, researcher at the Public Health Agency of Barcelona (ASPB) and one of the authors of the study. Then, they compared the overall results of all the metropolises and found that, on the whole, the areas located at the highest level in terms of unemployment -with the highest unemployment rates- had 15.8% more exposure to dioxide. nitrogen than those municipalities with lower unemployment levels. In this line, lower family income areas showed almost 5% more pollution than high income areas. Population density was one of the most significant parameters, since the most populated metropolitan areas had up to 48.7% more pollution than the less populated ones.

Pollution breeds with the poorest areas of the great European metropolises

Marí-Dell'Olmo points out that the data are "representative of the metropolitan areas" but admits limitations in the study. "The power of the study is in many metropolitan areas, but we have to keep in mind that we are working with areas. We can not individualize. And in addition, some areas are very large and others very small. Some have a million inhabitants and another 10,000. So in the big ones you may not see the differences or the heterogeneities because everything is concentrated within the same value ", he clarifies. Another limitation is that metropolitan areas start from a different socio-economic reality and do not compare to each other. In this way, for example, unemployment levels in Barcelona range between 16.9% (minimum) and 36.6% (maximum). Stockholm, on the other hand, plays with figures between 1.4% and 9.9%, any of them well below the best rates in Barcelona.

In this sense, coindice Bénédicte Jacquemin, researcher at ISGlobal, a center promoted by La Caixa. She has also studied the phenomenon of environmental inequality. In his research, published in 2017 in the magazine Environment International, it was concluded that the socioeconomic level is not necessarily linked to increased exposure to air pollution. "Here the areas are very large. In our study we did it on a smaller geographical scale and with individual information. We looked at each participant's environmental exposure and socio-economic data and also the contextual socioeconomic level. At the micro level, this difference is not so clear ", the researcher justifies. All in all, Jacquemin points out that also in his study, when looking at the socio-economic context data (not the particulars of each individual) there was also "a tendency" that people living in more disadvantaged areas were more exposed to pollution .

The ISGlobal researcher points out that in Europe there are not many studies comparing these elements and the methodologies used, in any case, they are very different. "In the United States yes they were made but the results depended on the cities that were taken into account. In non-typical cities such as San Francisco or New York these associations were not found, "he says. Jacquemin argues that part of these inequalities do not only respond to socioeconomic elements, but also to "the organization of cities".

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