Last month, the United Nations General Assembly passed a historic resolution declaring access to a healthy environment a universal human right.

The resolution has been lauded around the world in recent weeks, raising hopes it will prod governments to tackle a host of long-neglected environmental problems.

At the top of the list for environmental campaigners is air pollution, which is responsible for nearly 10 per cent of all global deaths.

“The resolution will empower people to claim their rights to a healthy environment,” said Soo-Young Hwang, a Legal Officer with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).  “And the right to breathe clean air is an integral component of the right to a healthy environment.”

Hwang made the comments ahead of the International Day of Clean Air for blue skies, which is designed to raise awareness about the dangers of air pollution.

The UN General Assembly resolution, which passed by a 161-0 vote on 28 July, is not legally binding on UN Member States. But its backers say it will have a profound effect on people’s understanding of their rights and encourage states to implement national laws and regional treaties that safeguard the environment.

Air pollution is one of the world’s gravest threats to public health, causing an estimated seven million people to die prematurely every year. While air pollution is a global threat, it is developing countries that suffer the most due to a  reliance on wood and other solid fuels, like coal, for cooking and heating. And even within developing countries, the crisis is felt most acutely by low-income and marginalized communities.

Air pollution also takes a heavy economic toll: according the World Bank, in 2019 alone, it cost the world economy US$8.1 trillion, equivalent to 6.1 per cent of global gross domestic product.

Those who have championed the UN General Assembly resolution say that it will help citizens, especially the poor, demand better air quality from governments and multinational corporations that pollute the environment.

Even before the resolution was passed, citizens, civil society groups and conservationists from Brazil to Indonesia have increasingly been using rights-based litigation to demand environmental justice, including the right to clean air.

In March of this year, the High Court of South Africa recognized the “poor air quality in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Highveld region as a breach of residents’ constitutional right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being.”  

Renée Gift, a Legal Officer with UNEP, said the General Assembly resolution could push more states to develop and enforce national outdoor air quality standards, which she called “integral” to ensuring clean air.

According to UNEP’s first global assessment of air pollution legislation in 2021, one-third of the world’s countries have no legally-mandated ambient air quality standards. And in many cases, even when these standards exist, they are not adhered to.

The recognition of the right to clean air at the national level would also create a strong basis for litigation against governments that fail to uphold air quality standards. This is already taking place in many jurisdictions and is likely to increase as a result of the resolution.

There are hopes the General Assembly declaration will have the same impact as a 2010 resolution declaring access to clean water a human right. “What happened with that resolution is that it compelled countries to review their legislation at the national level,” said Hwang.

“What that meant was that water had to be accessible, it had to be affordable, and it had to integrate non-discrimination clauses. This has changed a lot of people’s lives, especially low income people,” she added.

Ultimately, the hope is that the most recent UN General Assembly resolution will not only move the needle on environmental rule of law and the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements on air quality but that it will empower citizens of the world to demand their right to breathe clean air.

As David Boyd, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, said, “having a right to a healthy environment changes people’s perspective from begging to demanding governments to act.”

Cambodia paving the way for cleaner air

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How to build more inclusive, climate-ready cities

The land use of our fathers – prospering in a healthy environment

How countries can tackle devastating peatland wildfires

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A new report by Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) identifies the main obstacles to the circularity of single-use glass. Key barriers presented in the “How Circular is Glass? A report on the circularity of single-use glass packaging” study include ineffective collection methods, design, and logistical shortcomings, leading to material and energy losses. Commissioned to Eunomia Research & Consulting by ZWE, the report is based on four case studies (France, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States), and uses 2019 data to calculate collection rate, overall recycling rate, closed-loop recycling rate, and recycled content as its four key performance indicators. The report found that:

ZWE has urged the European Commission (EC) to make use of the reports’ findings in their upcoming revision of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (P&PWD).

“The P&PWD revision should act on the findings of this report by not only improving the circularity of single-use glass, but also by scaling up more refillable glass packaging systems across Europe and thus helping to tackle the current energy crisis”, says Larissa Copello, Consumption and Production Campaigner at Zero Waste Europe. “This can be done, for instance, by including effective closed-loop recycling via deposit return schemes (DRS) which include single-use glass; and by increasing the market shares of refillable glass packaging via strong reuse targets. We cannot ignore the truth about the single-use of glass anymore: its massive energy consumption during primary production puts single-use glass at the top of materials with the greatest environmental impacts. Yet, these are not justified, since this material is perfectly suited for reuse and recycling.” In addition to the non-profit’s policy recommendations for packaging in the revised P&PWD, and taking the report’s findings into account, ZWE asks the EC to:

Our ancestors dealt with large-scale environmental challenges thousands of years ago. Understanding their traditional practices may inform modern Europeans racing to adapt to climate change today.

Heathlands, with their scrubby, woody plants and sandy soil, cover large tracts of Europe. Although the soil is not very nourishing, heathlands are home to unique flora and fauna. Once believed to be natural scrubland, most heathlands were formed when forests were cleared for agriculture in prehistoric times.

The existence of heathlands is maintained with the grazing and burning techniques of land management over long timeframes. They must constantly be renewed, and in some respects, heathlands are deeply entangled in the human cultural landscape.

Many heathlands have survived for thousands of years through countless climate, population, economic and infrastructural transformations. Their resilience may suggest ways in which humans and nature can thrive together dynamically, if their ecological fabric can be understood.

Today, heathlands are under threat with more than 90% of them disappearing in the last 150 years, mainly due to the intensification of farming, a lack of sustained management, and because of pollution from industry.

The ANTHEA project, also known as Anthropogenic Heathlands: The Social Organization of Super-Resilient Past Human Ecosystems, researches the ways in which human interactions with heathlands have changed over time.

‘There is currently a trend towards nature conservation and restoration resting on the idea that we want to take people out of nature,’ said Prof Mette Løvschal, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who studies Neolithic heather landscapes from an archaeological perspective. Yet, she argues that ‘heathlands and their more than 5 000 year survival depend on the presence of humans.’

Thousands of years ago, people in Northern Europe cleared tracts of post-glacial forest to create space for their grazing animals. Naturally-occurring species of heather flourished in such landscapes, providing an evergreen source of winter grazing and other valuable resources such as fuel and bedding.

For thousands of years, humans have continued to maintain these special areas, in which nature and humans rely on each other. The question is, what features of the landscape – location, soil composition, habitation, land use and organisation factors, for example – are important to the survival of heathland.

Heathlands offer pastoralists an advantage over grass in that, while grass is more nutrient rich than heather, it tends to die out in winter. In fact, farmers’ livestock – sheep and goats in particular – can graze on heather in the cold months, without farmers having to collect and store fodder. These landscapes require continuous maintenance over generations, Løvschal explained.

‘Heathlands in themselves are an unstable landscape,’ said Løvschal. ‘Most places quite quickly, within 15 to 25 years, transform into forest if you don’t manage them with grazing, cutting, or by controlled fires.’

For the ANTHEA project, researchers are combining the archaeological history of humans with ancient plant records in seven case-study areas from Norway to Ireland.

‘Several of us are working with archaeological material,’ said Løvschal. ‘When do the earliest kinds of settlements appear in the heathlands? Is there any evidence of people using heather or turf as a construction material or as fuel or as bedding?’

With that information, the researchers will see how people engaged with the heathland on a practical as well as a social and ideological level.  

Excavation of ancient pollen can reveal which plants once inhabited the landscape. Tree, shrub and grass pollen blow through the air before settling on the ground or sinking to the bottom of a body of water. Over time, soil and organic matter cover this pollen, trapping it in the ground.

By extracting long cylindrical samples of soil, known as cores, from the bottom of lakes or wetlands, researchers can identify and date the pollen and ultimately reconstruct the ancient landscape. Microscopic charcoal also points to whether the heathland had been burnt and when.

This is not the first time heathlands have been under threat, Løvschal said. During the Bronze Age, about 5 000 years ago, people tore up large tracts of heathland and grasslands to create human burial mounds, known as barrows. Unfortunately, this activity ‘led to an ecological catastrophe’ since removing turf causes an extreme depletion of soil fertility. On the other hand, there have also been times at which humans and heathlands were ‘in beautiful balance’.

One of the major questions the ANTHEA project addresses is the ways in which this ‘beautiful balance’ was achieved by different pastoral groups across Europe and ‘whether the long-term survival of these heathlands was the product of people doing very similar kinds of things or whether they gave rise to a myriad of ways of living and organising.’

The TerraNova project is also looking to ancient landscapes to identify ways in which humans can sustainably coexist with nature.

‘We want to understand how natural landscapes have been shaped over time in order to find the best practical guidelines and solutions for sustainable land use,’ said Prof Karl-Johan Lindholm, an archaeologist at Uppsala University and co-investigator on TerraNova.

Archaeology divides historical epochs based on human technology and tool development, so we have The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, and The Iron Age.

Anthropology, on the other hand, identifies human organisation by size and complexity, so you have community, tribe, and state, Lindholm explained. ‘None of these conventional explanatory frameworks is really helpful for land management.’ That’s why the researchers are applying an interdisciplinary approach, using information from archaeology, ecology, climatology, and landscape studies.

The project is investigating land use over time at different ‘field laboratories’, which run along river catchment areas in Sweden, in Germany and the Netherlands, and in Portugal, Romania and Spain, Lindholm said. Catchment areas represent a number of different environments through which water flows to a river. 

By mining existing data in the archaeological and paleo-ecological (the study of ecosystems in the distant past) records, the project will model the vegetation, animal distribution and human land use over time to develop different scenarios and land-cover models.

‘Our ambition is to have a digital European atlas,’ Lindholm said.

TerraNova researchers are also engaging with people who are currently managing land to provide insight and tools for policymakers.

‘Basically what TerraNova aims to do is better understand these kinds of landscape histories in order to provide recommendations, tools, and guidelines for helping today’s land managers to understand and manage their landscapes in a more sustainable way,’ he said.

The research in this article was funded via the EU’s European Research Council and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine. 

Cambodia, the Southeast Asian country, known for the temples of Angkor Wat and the French colonial architecture of Siem Reap, is becoming increasingly vulnerable to air pollution.

In order to understand and combat the threat, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), through the Asia Pacific Clean Air Partnership and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, has partnered with the Cambodian Ministry of Environment to develop the country’s first Clean Air Plan.

“Air pollution could not only be considered as a local problem, but a regional and global phenomenon which requires contribution from all parties,” said Say Samal, Cambodia’s Minister of Environment. “This plan is a significant step towards identifying science-based policy decisions towards managing air quality in the country.”

Cambodia is a rural nation with over 60 per cent of its 16 million people living in the countryside. Historically, air pollution has come from wood and charcoal burning, agricultural fires and the incineration of waste. But as it develops, Cambodia is facing a wave of urban pollution. Recent research by UNEP shows that the largest sources of pollution in Cambodia today are transport, electricity generation, industry and residential development.    

Cambodia is not the only country contending with air pollution. Approximately 99 per cent of the global population breathes unclean air and air pollution is responsible for 7 million deaths annually, or more than 10 per cent of all fatalities.

Launched in January 2022 Cambodia’s Clean Air Plan, based on the UNEP report Actions on Air Quality, outlines a package of measures to address the major sources of current and future emissions in the country. It is the first time a national report has been produced in Cambodia to measure health-damaging air pollutants and it collected data from the transport, agriculture, construction, energy and water sectors.

Fully implemented, the plan could reduce two major pollutants, PM 2.5 and black carbon, by 60 per cent. It could also help slash emissions of methane and carbon dioxide, key drivers of climate change, by 24 per cent and 18 per cent respectively by 2030. Those improvements would help Cambodia avoid almost 900 premature deaths per year. 

The Clean Air Plan found that transport is one of the main contributors to air pollution. According to the Cambodian Ministry of Public Works and Transport, between 2015 and 2019 the number of registered vehicles in the country rose by around 65 per cent. UNEP’s Global Trade in Used Vehicles Report found that Cambodia is one of the countries in the region with substantial imports of used vehicles; these are usually over 10 years old and are significant contributors to air pollution and climate emissions. 

One of the goals of the Clean Air Plan is to raise standards for vehicle emissions. It also aims to limit the age of imported cars, transitioning the country’s automotive fleet to newer, less polluting vehicles that meet stringent European Union standards.

The plan also found that construction was a major contributor to pollution and that by managing the release of dust and particle matter into the environment, pollution could be significantly reduced.

Some of the plan’s other measures include improving cookstoves and shifting from biomass to biogas for cooking. The plan builds on 25 clean air measures developed by the Asia Clean Air Partnership.

“The launch of the Clean Air Plan is an important step and underlines Cambodia’s commitment to improving air quality,” said Dechen Tsering, UNEP Regional Director and Representative for Asia and the Pacific. “We look forward to continue working with the Ministry of Environment to support these efforts.”

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