Germany, KRG undertake assessment of Kurdistan Region’s air quality

A tower in downtown Erbil during a dust storm in 2020. (Photo: Anadolu Agency)
A tower in downtown Erbil during a dust storm in 2020. (Photo: Anadolu Agency)

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – In a joint project with Germany and Finland, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)’s environment department launched a scheme to improve the Region’s air quality.

The project aims to determine the current state of air quality across the Kurdistan Region’s provinces through monitoring stations and satellite images, Ahmed Mohammad, the spokesperson for the KRG Board of Environment told Kurdistan 24 English on Tuesday.

The NGO German Corporation for International Cooperation, known as GIZ, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute are also involved in the scheme, which will see participants exchange data of the current quality of the environment.

The Kurdistan Region will provide air quality information it has gathered from monitoring stations and the German entities will share the satellite data they have on the Region’s air condition, Mohammad said.

The German Consulate General in Erbil on Monday said that work began on April 22.

“This is a first step in broader cooperation between Germany and the Kurdistan Region,” Mohammad said, adding that coordination began in 2013.

The Region’s air contains toxic chemicals that can have devastating health impacts, including sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and inhalable airborne particulate matter called PM10.

Environmentalists and activists regularly warn against rising air pollution and its effects on society, calling on the KRG and companies to take bold action against the climate threat.

The Kurdish region has, in total, eight air quality monitoring stations across its provinces, with six of them in Duhok, which has independently procured them from Germany’s federal Hessen region.  

Once the air quality assessment ends, the Kurdish, German, and Finnish partners will begin to look at targeted measures in order to improve air quality, including growing greenery, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and encouraging environmentally-friendly practices, Ahmed said.

In January, the Iraqi president signed the parliament’s ratification of the Paris Agreement, an international pact to combat global warming, in part by limiting the rise in global average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Both Iraq and the Kurdistan Region rely heavily on hydrocarbon sales to maintain their economies. The amount of pollution and greenhouse emissions such oil refineries and installations emit poses significant health and environmental impacts.

Editing by Joanne Stocker-Kelly