City Solutions Toolkit: Guide to Mainstreaming Air Quality in Urban Development

Mainstreaming air quality in a city’s urban development can be understood as operating on two levels: (1) integrating air quality management (AQM) into governance, institutional arrangements, and processes and (2) including air quality goals and considerations in the city’s overall development goals, performance indicators, and plans. This module uses the development of a clean air action plan (CAAP) as the entry point for several of the approaches or steps it prescribed. This will make it easier for air quality managers, technical officers and policymakers to integrate the mainstreaming into their AQM activities. Mainstreaming is important as it allows cities to work on key issues such as air pollution, public health, transportation, waste management or energy management simultaneously. This offers an opportunity for a more realistic accounting of benefits of a policy or measure, thereby delivering maximum impact using existing resources (Clean Air Asia, 2019).