Air Pollution Monitoring Not in Place in Some Serbian Towns

Belgrade (BETAPHOTO/ANA SLOVIC)

Denial of excessive air pollution at all levels of administration had further postponed implementation of appropriate measures, while towns, whose citizens accounted for 19 percent of Serbia’s population, had no automatic air pollution monitoring systems, the National Environmental Association (NEA) said in a release on Jan. 4.  

The association, according to the release, has prepared a report titled “Air 2021,” containing data from the open data portal, which last year served “as the basis for a different, objective hourly and daily presentation of air quality from all automatic air quality monitoring stations.”

According to the association, Kragujevac, Zrenjanin, Leskovac, Krusevac, Vranje, Sombor, Loznica, Jagodina, Stara Pazova, Kikinda, Pirot, Backa Palanka, Ruma, Paracin, Sremska Mitrovica, Pozarevac, and Zajecar are the towns each with a population of more than 50,000 citizens which do not have automatic air quality monitoring systems, primarily for concentration of PM.  

“Around 1.35 million citizens live in these towns, or 19 percent of Serbia’s population, so the recommendations of high state administration officers that ‘unverified’ data and applications should not be used should be particularly explained to the citizens of these towns as they would have no possibility of learning about the quality of air they breathe, if the so-called ‘civil’ monitoring data was not available,” NEA said in the release.