Setting Strategic Environmental Goals for Air Pollution: Integrating Critical Loads into Local Environmental Planning

This paper explores the potential for local and regional governments to set environmental policies for air pollution deposition. National-level government agencies have been given responsibility for monitoring and modelling air pollution deposition and for setting policies to ameliorate the problem. Therefore local governments falsely assume that this issue is outside municipal control. A gap exists in the capacity for integrating national polices into local plans affecting air pollution deposition. Using Stockholm, Sweden, as a case-study, the paper demonstrates a method for local governments to integrate local-, national- and international-level air pollution deposition scenarios. A nitrogen load critical model was used to determine the impact of the deposition scenarios. The data show the complexity of potential results that can occur.