Isidro A. Pérez

Research with Spanish participation concludes that, in European countries, tropospheric ozone pollution from beyond national borders was associated with 88% of ozone-attributable deaths, and only 12% were due to domestic sources. The authors, whose research is published in Nature Medicine, used epidemiological and air quality modelling to quantify the burden of mortality in Europe associated with ozone pollution from various geographical sources. This included more than six million deaths in 813 regions in 35 European countries - including Spain - in the 2015-2017 warm seasons. 

Research led by ISGlobal and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) shows that air pollution in 35 European countries - including Spain - has decreased in terms of levels of suspended particulate matter (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). However, ozone (O₃) pollution increased in southern Europe, as shown by daily data collected between 2003 and 2019 and published in the journal Nature Communications. The study also looked at the number of days on which limits for two or more pollutants were exceeded simultaneously: despite improvements, 86.3% of the European population experienced at least one day with compound pollution per year.