The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has this Thursday issued its judgment on breaches of air quality standards in Barcelona city, the Vallès counties of the Barcelona metropolitan area, and the city of Madrid and, as expected, given that it had been indicated by the measurements of recent years, the ruling is a strong blow against Spain, with the European high court finding that the Catalan capital violated the air quality directives "systematically". The ruling states that Barcelona and Madrid exceeded the maximum permitted levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) between the years 2010 and 2018, while in the case of Vallès Oriental, Vallès Occidental and part of the Baix Llobregat county, all near Barcelona city, the breaches were produced between 2010 and 2017. In the judgment, European justice emphasizes that the omission of climate objectives put at risk the health of the 4.2 million residents of Barcelona and the Vallès counties.
The position of European justice comes after numerous warnings from the European Commission, which warned on repeated occasions that it would go to the EU courts over the breaches of air quality standards in central Barcelona, its metropolitan area and Madrid city unless they took corrective measures. In fact, a first warning was sent to the Spanish state in 2017 and, two years later, the situation was referred to the European Court of Justice to highlight the seriousness of the violation. In the complaint presented to the ECJ, the Commission pointed out that urban areas had exceeded the levels of nitrogen dioxide "systematically and continuously" between 2010 and 2018 and stated that none of the cities had designed new plans to guarantee the quality of the air. For now, the sentence does not entail any penalty, but warns against persisting with non-compliance.
Barcelona municipality saw it coming
Although the sentence confirms that, indeed, in Barcelona, the maximum pollution thresholds were exceeded, the Barcelona city council already expected this decision from the court. This very Tuesday, the municipal government moved pre-emptively to claim that the drop in pollution in the last few years is proof of the council's efforts in this regard, in addition to admitting in advance that the sentence would be damning, as it finally was. The city councillor for the Climate Emergency and Ecological Transition, Eloi Badia, admitted that they were already anticipating a negative ruling, because the measurement data itself reflected that European regulations has been breached since 2010.