By Martin Banks - 8th September 2011
Bad air quality is a major health problem in most European cities
NGO coalition
Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen are the leading cities in Europe for combating air pollution, according to a ranking of 17 European cities.
However, Rome, Madrid and London are poorly graded for their lack of effort to improve air quality.
The city ranking was compiled by a coalition of green NGOs to highlight what has been done to improve air quality in western European cities.
The cities are meant to follow European limits on the levels of a number of harmful pollutants in our air.
Berlin took top spot in the ranking for its efforts to improve air quality.
The green groups praised Berlin's broad strategy to tackle high emitters of dangerous pollutants and reduce car use in the city.
As a result, the groups say Berlin provided a good example of a long-term strategy to take people out of their cars and into public transport and other modes of transport such as cycling and walking.
Runners-up Copenhagen and Stockholm were praised for having the best economic incentives, such as congestion charges for vehicles entering the city centre and parking management to reduce the number of vehicles in the city.
Rome, Milan and Düsseldorf finished bottom, showing few efforts on any of the nine air quality measures used to rank the cities.
The measures were selected based on their potential to reduce emissions of particulate matter and soot from traffic and non-road pollution sources.
London, hosts of next year's Olympics, Madrid and Brussels also gained F grades.
A spokesman for the alliance said, "Bad air quality is a major health problem in most European cities. In the most polluted cities the average life expectancy is reduced by over two years on average.
For the whole of the EU, the health cost of bad air quality is estimated to be nearly half a million premature deaths each year. In economic terms, the health damage from air pollution in 2000 was estimated to amount to between €277 and €790bn for a year.
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