A first for air quality gurus

A groundbreaking air quality guideline for municipalities puts ECOSERV at the frontline of change

ECOSERV director Mark Baird and GEO Environmental Consulting director Catherine Fedorsky have been commissioned by the Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning (DEADP) to write a groundbreaking air quality guideline document for municipalities in the province.

“Each municipality is required by legislation to put in place an Air Quality management plan for their municipality,” says Mark. “The Western Cape DEADP wants to put forward a template to guide cities and towns. Catherine and I are putting together the guidelines and a checklist which DEAT will use to measure municipal performance and progress in their AQ management plans.”

The guildeline has to be user-friendly but at the same time provide enough detail for professionals to understand how to roll it out in their area. “Ours is one of the first guidelines in the country and it is really important,” says Catherine. “We are taking it very seriously.”

While Mark's focus is the technical aspects of air monitoring, Catherine's areas of specialty are AQ management, ISO 14001 environmental management systems, and energy and environment. “With my policy strategy background, I can offer the team a different focus in the AQ field,” says Catherine. “Much of my experience is with ISO 14001 which fits in nicely with the requirements of the Act.”

Mark and Catherine are working closely with a core team from the DEADP to come up with a broad outline for the guide. “Then we must narrow down the focus without losing too much information,” says Catherine. “If it is too simple, there's no point.”

The two currently have no guidance from national government to work with as this programme is running in parallel with the national plan development, making the task challenging. “With no guidelines, our baseline must be South African law,” says Catherine. “This is nerve-wracking and puts a lot of pressure on us to anticipate what will happen in the future. But it's also quite exciting because we can influence what happens in the Western Cape and potentially the rest of the country as well.”

Key to the process of coming up with the guidelines is information gathering. “We have spent a lot of time seeing what is out there and looking at best practice trends internationally. There is a strong body of guidance material and good things are happening internationally. We can bring the guideline in line with what we need to do in SA and fortunately we can do it without starting at the beginning.”

Catherine says SA is in the position of being able pick and choose from the experiences of international agencies and authorities. “The US Environmental Protection Agency has 45 years' of experience, Canada has some surprisingly interesting ideas and the UK is doing amazing things with congestion tax. A lot of these agencies have spent years finding out what works and have a lot of experience on how to communicate with the public and deal with things like public complaints and the licensing issue.”

As rosy as it sounds, Catherine is quick to point out that international best practices will not necessarily work in South Africa . “We have to consider many factors which do not apply to the developing world, such as townships, informal areas, a lower education base, and language problems. We have a huge disparity in our society so getting a message across and implementing change is a huge challenge. And that's what makes it so exciting.”

This diversity will mean the Western Cape can't resort to just one communication or strategy to roll out their AQ management plan. “They might need two or three strategies for different parts of society which will make it time consuming and expensive. But we have to acknowledge the problems and work with them. It will be interesting to see how the process is rolled out to different cities and towns through the Western Cape 's communication system.”

With huge gaps in AQ information, AQ monitoring has been identified as a priority starting point. “Monitoring is crucial. You can't manage effectively without information. We may have a gut feel for where the problem hot spots are but monitoring will play a huge role in establishing where they lie. The province will be buying five mobile monitoring units to transport around the province to figure out what is going on. Building up a database takes time.”

But for Mark and Catherine, time is short. Their deadline is July this year. “It would be fantastic if we had more time to develop and implement the plan but the Western Cape feel now is the time to do something and have attached urgency to the project.”

Catherine is hopeful this guideline will lead to bigger things. “The guide will place ECOSERV in a strong position in the next few years. It's our aim to make this the leading guide of its type in the country so we hope that it's an opportunity for our companies to collaborate in the future again.”