Sustainability

Air monitoring

To be able to develop and enforce measures (that taken together make up an “environmental policy”) that may effectively bring a country’s development back to the environmental sustainability principle, the health conditions of the environment in the different geographical areas that compose a territory need to be accurately known. Then, the causes that have led to environmental degradation can be identified and measures can be proposed for reclaiming the environment and reducing or removing the sources of pollution. In the case of the atmosphere, natural or artificial methods are used to monitor the state of the environment. As far as artificial methods are concerned, man builds a complex network of detectors placed in strategic points of the area concerned that analyse the air by detecting the presence of some pollutants (aerosol observation methods).
Air quality control measures the concentration levels of atmospheric pollutants and checks if the threshold values are exceeded or not. The threshold (or guiding) value of a given pollutant is calculated on the basis of criteria that differ in each country, but that are still related to the protection of the health of man and nature. Only a small fraction of the atmospheric pollutants is measured, since there are not sufficiently accurate and precise measuring techniques, that may detect them 24 hours a day, available for all of them. These pollutants can however accurately indicate the level of pollution of the atmosphere.
Bio-monitoring
Another method to check air quality, this time a natural method, is bio-monitoring, i.e. the use of living organisms to monitor environmental alterations. Bio-monitoring studies the effects of air pollution on organisms and their communities, such as lichens.