On the occasion of the International Day of Clean Air for blue skies, which falls on September 7, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MoECC) has stressed the importance of enhancing the international efforts to maintain air quality as a key component of natural environment.
Through its official X account, MoECC pointed out that caring for air is not an option but rather a pressing necessity to maintain good health and sustain the environment for a better daily life and the future of the young generations. MoECC noted that caring for the purity of air involves many positive outcomes, which include guaranteeing better air environment and avoid putting more burden on the international health system, due to the troubles and diseases caused by polluted air. Such polluted air causes the death of around 8.1 mn persons around the world. Besides, investment in air purity participates towards raising public awareness on the key importance of air quality for their life. Further, air quality is vital for agriculture crops and pure air provides these crops with better protection, which would eventually enhance food security and maintain investments in the involved fields. Accordingly, MoECC stressed that investment in pure air is quite important to achieve general and public interests.
The United Nations General Assembly adopted September 7 as International Day of Clean Air for blue skies in 2019 aiming to raise awareness and encourage actions to improve air quality.
Earlier, MoECC launched the Air Quality Platform for the public its website, which gives access to all users to get adequate information on the air quality levels in all the different areas of the country displayed on the screen at the website. Such information is collected through 40 air quality monitor stations distributed on key locations throughout the country. Such stations use the latest sophisticated technology to collect the related highly reliable data, which is displayed on MoECC screens using easily accessible indicators and patterns, as part of the efforts of the government to protect the health of its residents. In addition, these air quality stations operate continuously and automatically to constantly monitor air quality in real time according to the highest global standards in the field.
In the meantime, MoECC has made great efforts to enhance the local environment and maintain natural reserves and meadows across the country as these are considered among the main components of enhancing air purity and mitigate the air pollution that results from the normal urban expansion operations. For instance, last year 150 mangroves were planted and 80 baby hawksbill turtles – threatened with extinction – were released into the sea. Also, many meadows and natural reserves were fenced off by MoECC to further protect them against ant potential intruders, in particular reckless vehicle entry there.
As part of such protection efforts MoECC, in co-operation with the Geographic Information Systems Centre at the Ministry of Municipality, has launched the digital geographic database project for biosphere reserves, which enables scanning and uploading data from 1,273 biosphere reserves across the country in a digital geographic database. This database indicates the type of threat encountered by these reserves to better assist the concerned entities in the protection and preservation efforts.
