Professor Hedley's Response to the AQO Review

Professor Anthony Hedley is one of the world’s leading experts on the health impacts of air pollution and chairs the Department of Community Medicine at Hong Kong University. Read his full response to Government’s official AQO questionnaire, which is summed up by the statements below:

• The government [AQO] document is misleading, disingenuous and lacks transparency and does not provide the public with an unbiased assessment of the choices which it is being asked to make.
• The term “with reference to the [WHO] guidelines & etc” is a mechanism for pretending that our new AQOs are based on thecollective global scientific evidence which underpin the AQGs, without actually having to adopt them and then deal with the vested interests that would have to clean up transportation, power generation and manufacturing.
• The most salient fact is that there is probably no other country or region with a comparable level of social, economic and technical development which has allowed a comparable level of poor air quality to develop without taking effective counter measures.
• [The] proposals for emission controls are vague, lack fail-safe implementation methods and timescales.