 Thanks for this opportunity because Smart Cities topic we have been trying to connect to the air quality for a while. I work as a scientist at NILU and I have also a function as a manager of the European Topic Centre for Air Transport, Noise and Industry which is a collaboration with the European Environment Agency and I am saying that because the Environment Agency is providing actually quite a lot of information about air quality and I think it is a relatively good well-kept secret when that is set. I will of course be talking about air quality and I will first take you through how good is actually the air quality right now. How did we get to this point and I will talk a little bit about what do we know about how does the public think and then I will see if I can give you some some information about how the public if the public can actually get involved and in what way and what are the challenges with that hopefully with some idea how to continue. In 2017 the EEA together with a number of other organizations have launched this air quality index so you can see this one of the first days of the index being online. This is actually quite a composite product it is based on something we call up-to-date data or UTD data which are data not fully quality controlled data passed from the monitoring stations in Europe and it is combined with a quite sophisticated system of models to produce this map. If you look how does it look like today so this is the picture I just downloaded right now and you can see that we have some issues with air quality right now. In Europe still we have exceedences of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide or nitrogen oxides in addition we have some problems with the ozone mostly in the southern areas and southern Italy and France so we have really not solved all the issues quite yet we can also we have also some estimates of how much does it cost so it's not only health that we cost but it's mostly health and in 2012 you can say from these numbers that the costs across Europe to E27 is roughly three times or twice the national budget of the Czech Republic so the costs are still quite substantial. We had a number of very good developments this is one of them not the only one but this is the concentration of lead in in the air and how is it and in Norwegian mosses in Norway we carry out the survey of mosses every five years and you can see that after the ban of lead in petrol the situation in Norway can be seen as a real huge improvement. Similar improvement you would see for example in acidification of lakes and if you look at how people are exposed you can see this does not go far enough back and that is because we only started collecting data on on that are relevant to exposure and data in cities in around year 2000 when the European directives came in place but you can see that for most compounds the exposure has decreased but not for all when you look at the history of European air quality so you can say that we have been systematically working on it throughout from the 70s or late 60s the first issue we tackled on a European level was the acid rain and that is when the first conventions came in place and they are of course they have been a major success with rather a lot of emission reductions and they have influenced significantly the European legislation the first protocols from the convention came around 1980s and they they were about regional air pollution but at that time we also started to work towards improvement of local and urban air and we also have been receiving first numbers or first data about persistent organic pollutants and their effect on human health and the health of animals for example most famous where the polar bears which are of course eating are a top predator so they eat up everything that has accumulated in the in the food chain and there was a lot of contamination with reproductive effect throughout the 90s the directives on air quality have been prepared and then they came into effect in the year 2000 and they among others made made requirements how and where and when to monitor air quality in cities at the same time we started Antarctic monitoring Europe has actually several stations in the Antarctic looking mostly at greenhouse gases but not only and this is the time where the integrated assessments really got their boom and of course nowadays we have new technologies that are maybe perhaps can be considered rather disruptive technologies as far as air quality monitoring goes because until now we have been developing reference instrumentation we have been basing ourselves on very high quality but very very few measurements now we have a possibility to have very many measurements of unknown quality but ubiquitous they can be everywhere and sometimes people talk about democratization of air quality i'm not quite sure i agree with that but anyway so during this time we have developed a system of management or governance of air quality that consists of three elements it is the air quality directives that regulate the concentrations of pollutants in the air and every every member state transposes them into their own legislation and then we have two types of legislation that is affecting sources this is the national emission ceiling directive which is looking increasingly at more and more sources and this is very closely connected to the protocols from the UNEC and then we have a number of source specific emission reduction directives such as for large power plants medium power plants we have eco design directive we have directives on eco efficiency we have fuel standards and the number of other other instruments so in this way all these three types of instruments are contributing to improvement on air quality and as you saw way they actually led to an improvement but if you look at the if this is enough then that is a argument that actually we can we can discuss on the left hand side this is from 2017 but i don't think there is a major change since then in 2017 this picture was part in the of the one of the ea reports and it shows that as far as european legislation goes we still are not fully in compliance but the situation is not too too good everywhere but when we look at the WHO guidelines which are based on scientific evidence only then we can see that the guidelines are stricter and that we are far from being compliance so there is a movement now towards sharpening the european legislation towards providing better protection to human health and being closer to the WHO guidelines so to summarize this we have had quite a lot of improvements but the health we can argue can is not still protected quite yet what happens if we ask people and the euro barometer is actually quite a great instrument in my opinion and there was a special euro barometer on environment and people were asked they what do they think if the among other things over the last 10 years and this is 2017 has the air quality improved in where they are and you can see that most people actually despite the the objective fact that the air quality has improved most people don't think so so in a way we are in a situation we have the official system that is perfectly quality ensured or there is a lot of procedures very good measurements with good precision good good specificity but people don't feel that there has been any progress in the last 10 years and they don't feel that actually they have any information again this is an older euro barometer form 2013 but i don't think we have a newer figure how informed do you feel about air quality problems in in your country and most people don't really feel really very well informed and that is despite the fact that that the air quality directive from the start has a requirement to inform the public and when you ask in for example in oslo we have asked people about what do they know about the air quality and is it what they know is is the information useful to them and again most people there is not very that's about half of people who think it's mostly useful but about half who are kind of not so convinced and this is despite the fact that air quality actually air quality portals have been available for a while and their quality warnings are available to the municipalities and there is a lot of information available to the municipalities and to the public about the sources of pollution and their effects so there is definitely something to be desired and that is i guess why these new technologies that are coming around 2012 you can see here that the timeline down here starts starts in around 2012 and and these so-called low cost sensors for air quality which are relevant for smart cities they came around the year 2010 and they have been modified from from work environment most of them and they are targeting ambient levels of air quality which is a big challenge still today because the ambient levels are in fact rather low so we have been working with this and working with the public on how to use this since 2012 we had a number of projects that were funded from the european research and now nowadays we have a quite large Norwegian projects together with municipalities like where we are helping municipalities or working together with municipalities in order to make them make them to enable them to use these new technologies in a useful way so if you look today there is a lot of different activities maybe the most well-known is the luftarten.info luftarten is is basically an NGO in germany that provides quite a lot of sensor data coming into their portal from those sensors they target particulate matter and it is quite interesting because you can really do your sensor yourself and connect it to the system and it will become a dot on the on the map and for example if you look here in Bulgaria these data are actually because in Bulgaria there are only four monitoring stations for urban air quality and there is i don't know if there is probably one or two in the background station so there is not really much available information on air quality but people have these sensors and for example doctors are using those sensors for impact assessment and that is a problem because we don't really know how the sensors work so we are using one technology for a purpose that it wasn't really designed for another such system is deep purple air that's again a particulate matter sensor you can buy from the US costs about I don't know 200 US dollars and what happens is that you install your sensor and then you then you connect it to the purple air server and purple air could provide you with this map and today this is quite an old map there are many more purple air sensors nowadays you can zoom in you can see your data all that is available what we have been doing well we have been trying to see if we can use the sensors for something to enhance the information we provide on air quality and we had you can see on this map here we had a number of sensors across Oslo and we have combined the results from these sensors with the other air quality information we have in a way so that they give reasonable contribution and this is one day in Oslo where you can see the main roads and the morning and afternoon rushes so in a way you can the sensors because they provide you information on a very high temporal resolution you can put them everywhere so you can actually get information from them that enhances the information you already have so if you look at what information do we have about air quality today so we are able to harvest up to the data this is again open data and they provide information about nearer time problem from the point of view of quality control is that they are not fully quality controlled but they can be accessed by the public we have excellent quality control data from the reference stations that says say something about the historical situations and this is of course for for research purposes for and for any other users and it provides a baseline then today something I haven't talked about is that we have actually quite a sophisticated system in many places for short term predictions of air quality usually those are either on a national level or on a local level and they those predictions are today often used as a basis for informing the public you might have noticed that on Euro news there is actually information about air quality and that is based on this kind of short term predictions and we are able to model model air quality but again we we generate this information as a combination of all the sources so not only measurements by reference stations but we also today have quite a lot of satellites that provide some information about their quality we have a combination of models and a lot of different types of models for different purposes and we also have a number of fora where these things are being developed so so you can say that today the problem really is not the lack of information we have a lot of information the information is very good but the question is are we able to tell about it to somebody who like the public for example one important thing is that these technologies you have always to consider if they are fit for purpose what do you want to do and if there is a legal requirement or not and the technology or the solution you want to use does it actually fit in with this requirement so there is a lot of work being done on the assessment of the performance of the of the sensors and if you look here this is for a p.m. sensor this is an article from 2019 and it shows that with higher relative humidity the sensor is not so providing good data so for like relative humidity over 80 percent the particle at matter sensor this particular one is not really providing very good information and this we are gaining more and more of such information and the sensor providers are improving their operation and and generally there is movement towards better better hardware but still it's not it's not always the good thing and whenever you want to use a sensor technology you need actually to look into the parameters of what of the outputs well where does it leave us in terms of governance of air quality we have this quite clear legislation and policy system that actually is to be to be implemented on local level but we have quite clear subsidiarity and who does what but if we ask the public they still think that the air pollution this is again 2017 that the air pollution is important and but then the question is where should it be handled and you can see that the level is the preferred place and it is a good question what do people actually think mean by that is it legislation or is it measures and then if you ask this is from Oslo what who people think should take care of their quality only very few things and people should do anything themselves but it's mostly the authorities or the industry here the municipality if it was not the first they could have more than one choice and this is just the first choice okay so I don't know how many set municipality at all but you can see that that that it's overwhelmingly not I who as a citizen who should do something about this and if you ask people how should they actually be involved some even say that they should not be involved some say that it's through voting in the election or in a referendum and most say that it's kind of like a discussion issue or or not which is not really very hard when you look at what municipalities say and this is a project from the that was funded by the Environment Agency and there is a report about it but I have municipalities even today have quite a lot of challenges when they want to implement their quality measures public opposition being one of those challenges so the question is if we give people sensors will we have will we help situation will there be less opposition and the solutions that we are trying to find out in Norway is exactly this kind of thing if we develop some kind of co-monitoring with the citizens and does it does it actually help problem is that this is a technically rather difficult system to set up if you buy one sensor and you buy it from your player you can see your data now imagine you buy 10 sensors you will have to see 10 different web pages right so if you are a municipality how are you going to handle that so you have a problem that you actually need to to get the data in see them under in one system get them out get them quality controlled because as a municipality you cannot just just do what you want you have legal obligations and by all means you should not misinform people and not having good information is is a very good road towards misinformation today then I see it like that that if you are a municipality or any authority in fact you have in relation to your quality and new technologies you have three types of challenges first of course relates to the picture I just showed in the previous slide how are we going to actually use the new technologies can we support citizens to provide their own data to our system and how when they have done that what do we do with those data and how do we relate the data to the citizens because we now know that one sensor actually is not really a good good thing but if you have a network of sensors we know that this actually provides pretty good information but how do you get from the single sensor to the network is still a bit of a research question then again if you are a municipality and you want to for example procure systems procure by a number of sensors you will have to write a specification for that how are you going to do that we have now worked with six municipalities in in Norway took us one year to work together with them to come up with a tender for for sensors right so this is not as not an unsubstantial challenge because if you do the tender tender wrong then you end up in a useless situation for yourself well these are technical and technological challenges that can be handled one challenge that I don't think we are particularly good at handling is actually okay so now you have connected your citizens you have asked them so how is that going to change your your system your operation how because as you know working with citizens is tricky if they feel that you have asked and then done nothing then you have a problem so in my opinion the technological challenges is something we are working on on procurement there have been number of places that successfully did that so there is a lot of no perhaps no blog there is information but on governance there I believe is the place where we actually have to work more thank you very much