VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities
Abstract
The paper will consider the potential for identifying legal reforms with the aim of addressing acute air pollution in urban environments through the use of digital mapping and twinning technology. The complex layering of the regulation of air quality and contributing factors to it in urban environments can complicate efforts to address inequities in urban air quality and adopt targeted measures to address them. The use of digital mapping and twinning to observe and predict air quality levels across urban landscapes affords the ability to consider acute instances of poor air quality and their causes and thus explore targeted legal reforms bespoke to far smaller geographical areas than has been previously possible. In doing so the paper will highlight the potential to avoid entrenched positions and inertia over measures to address urban air quality through proposed emissions reductions zones and similar measures. The paper will also highlight the benefits of o addressing apparent but often not considered social and health inequalities arising from air pollution as encapsulated in the tragic death of Ella Kiss-Debrah and resulting coroner’s report which for the first time officially recognised air pollution as contributing to a death in the UK. This watershed moment only amplifies the need for air pollution to be a central consideration in the planning and regulation of liveable cities.
Dr John Pearson is Senior Lecture in Environmental Law at Manchester Law School. He research focuses on targeted environmental regulation and the intersection of this with human rights. His most recent work has considered the human rights implications of failure to sufficiently address air quality and in particular the potential for a breach of the right to life to be upheld owing to acute instances of air pollution which highlight social and health inequalities.