A new website monitors air quality and noise levels in Dublin

Dublin has also committed to meeting WHO air quality guidelines by 2030.    

What is the air quality in Dublin like? And is Ireland’s capital noisy? Finding out answers to these two questions has now become easier.

Dublin City Council has launched the website Dublincityairandnoise.ie through which people can access real time information about the city’s air quality and sound levels in Dublin.

“Our citizens and their public representatives have been looking for some time for credible, readily accessible and real time information on the air quality across their city, and this new website is an important milestone for Dublin City Council in meeting that need,” Martin Fitzpatrick, Principal Environmental Health Officer, said.

There are, in total, 14 air quality monitoring stations around Dublin, of which eight are part of the national air quality monitoring network and are run in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency. Apart from these stations, 13 sound level monitoring stations have been placed across the capital.

The launch of the website comes a few weeks after Dublin joined, as the first Irish city, a community of 76 cities around the world in an effort to bring air quality down to levels that are not dangerous to people.

Becoming “climate brave”

Dublin signed a commitment to meet air quality levels set by the World Health Organisation on February 17. The capital is to meet the safer levels within the BreatheLife campaign by 2030.

“Hitting the target will involve difficult and potentially unpopular decisions. We’ll all need to be brave if we’re to make the right decisions for our city,” the Deputy Lord Mayor of Dublin Tom Brabazon said.

Mr Brabazon and mayors of three other Dublin local authorities, namely Fingal, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, and South Dublin County, which joined the campaign, said this will require more changes within road transport, allocating more road space to cyclists, buses and trams, and pedestrians. Households will have to move away from burning solid and fossil fuels to heat their homes as well, they agreed.

“We are seeing more of the impacts of climate change on our environment and the actions that are needed to tackle this crisis require the support of the entire community,” Mayor of Fingal Eoghan O’Brien claimed.

He went on saying that Fingal began to improve air quality with programs like the School Streets initiative which has already reduced carbon emissions outside of a primary school in Malahide. Nevertheless, climate activist Beth Doherty said the climate crisis can be solved only if “sustainability is accessible to all”.

WHO claimed 7 million people die from air pollution every year. In addition, up to 92 percent people in the world breath air the quality of which does not meet the organisation’s standards.