The training course on Air Quality and Health - Methods, Tools and Practices for Better Air Quality Action Planning has been prepared for the Urban Agenda Partnership on Air Quality with support from the Directorate–General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission.

The general objective of the training course is to contribute to help EU cities, regions, and Member States overcome the challenge of air pollution and reduce its negative impact on health, by making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

The Partnership recognised that the mere compliance to EU limit values – although fundamental – will not by itself ensure a healthy city. Reaching the WHO recommended health targets is a more ambitious goal recommended to improve the health of the citizens. As more needs to be done, the Partners decided to focus on ‘The Healthy City’ as a shared vision to address that emerging challenge through:

• Alignment between EU limit values and WHO recommended health standards,
• Better integration of air quality measures with measures from other relevant policy sectors (mobility, energy, climate, agriculture, rural, regional and urban development, etc.),
• Multi-governance level approach, based on close cooperation between different governance levels (local, regional, national, European) on air quality issues.

The shared vision of The Healthy City encompasses five main components, defining the areas of work of the Partnership, as illustrated below.

After four years of cooperation in the areas above, the Partners have produced an integrated package of deliverables to make the shared vision of The Healthy City a reality. They are presented in the following table per each component.

Each deliverable represents a fundamental contribution to building ‘The Healthy City’, and is now ready to be shared with, customized and taken up by other interested stakeholders (cities, local authorities, regions, member states).

The Partnership believes that it is essential that the methodology used for transferring the knowledge developed by the Partnership in a training is consistent with the holistic approach to air quality and health that underpins the whole package and that has inspired the Partnership’s work from the start.

To that end, we propose a training concept based on the production of a simplified, tailored, user-friendly scenario for The Healthy City, where trainees would be enabled to interact with the Partners to acquire the knowledge made available by the Partners in an organic manner, discovering the work done by the Partners component by component and acquiring / customising tools, methods and practices along the process.

The training course is available below.