On
December 12th 2012 Jim Longhurst was delighted to deliver the first
Christmas lecture for Southampton University’s Centre for Environmental
Science. Jim took a deliberately polemical position is his
talk contrasting the successful review and assessment process with the action
planning process in local air quality management. He described how the review
and assessment of local air quality had been successful in identifying areas of
air quality objective exceedence and in so doing had delineated a new geography
of air pollution. He contrasted this with the failure of the action planning
process to revoke air quality management areas. He reviewed the variety of
evidence from official sources indicating the scale and magnitude of the health
effects arising from exposure to adverse concentrations of air pollution and
asked why we had arrived at a position where the policy intent and the process of
remediation were misaligned. He explored whether this was a political failing
and described the situation as the mismanagement of air quality.
