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The Air Working Group announced on Wednesday that since they had failed to reduce the serious air pollution in the capital, the Air Working Group decided not to accept the Budapest Prize awarded to it by the Budapest General Assembly without a vote. against or an abstention.
In a letter sent to the members of the Budapest General Assembly, the NGO writes: “The Air Working Group has been working for clean air in Budapest for more than three decades to make as few people sick as possible or lose their power. life prematurely due to air pollution, but we are getting further and further away. The level of air pollution regularly exceeds sanitary limits. (Limit values that are sometimes much higher than those recommended by the World Health Organization). And the measurements of the Air Task Force and Greenpeace suggest that the situation is much worse than what the official measurement stations show ”.
According to the European Environment Agency, more than 13,000 people in Hungary die prematurely each year due to air pollution, and these people lose more than 10 years of their lives on average. In proportion to the population, bad air causes the premature death of some 2,500 people in Budapest. The number of children with asthma increases year after year, doubling between 2001 and 2017 in our capital. This situation was exacerbated by the coronavirus epidemic, which highlighted the dangers of air pollution. According to a recent study published in the Journal of the European Society of Cardiology, a quarter of deaths caused by COVID-19 in Hungary can be attributed to air pollution.
According to his letter, a study by the European Public Health Association (EPHA) shows that polluted air causes a loss of about 3.3 billion euros a year, equivalent to 6.2 percent of the GDP produced in Budapest. In terms of the severity of the loss per capita, Budapest ranks 22nd out of 432 European cities surveyed with 1,860 euros (680,000 guilders) per year.
András Lukács, President of the Air Working Group, said: “We know that the problem is extremely complex and its solution depends on the cooperation of many actors. At the same time, in recent decades, we have made numerous proposals to the government and the Metropolitan Municipality to improve air quality, and these proposals have been incorporated into various official documents almost without exception. However, there has been very little progress in practice and several setbacks. So we have not achieved our goal and we believe that this failure should not be rewarded. We will be delighted to receive the Budapest Prize when the concentration of air pollution at any of the official air quality measurement stations in Budapest does not exceed the permitted limit value for a full year ”.
At the same time, the Air Working Group offered representatives of the capital further cooperation to improve air quality in Budapest in a relatively short time and at a reasonable cost.
Gergely Karácsony, Mayor of Budapest, also responded to the Air Working Group’s letter, saying that András Lukács and the Air Working Group that he founded and led in Budapest, and even the country’s “green conscience”, the message of rejection of the award for Budapest is clear: the one to deliver.
Christmas wrote on Facebook that “this is exactly the work of NGOs. Dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction gives politics the task of not neglecting its objectives to listen to citizens, civilians and their organizations. To address real problems and do not believe nonexistent “.
He stressed that the rejection of the award “is not an insult but a warning” and understands the message. “We still have a long way to go, but we have started and we will not go back,” he said. According to Christmas, the climate crisis and pandemic clearly show that there is only one way to a sustainable future, and that way is green, so they increase the proportion of green spaces, protect and plant new trees, replace diseased trees with trees. healthy, reduce traffic in inner districts, modernize public transportation, create opportunities for walking and biking, and thus examine the climate impact of each of their decisions.
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