NCSR “Demokritos” ENRACT participates as Affiliated Entity in the RI-UBANS project, co-ordinated by the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), and including 27 other partners from Finland, Italy Germany, France, Norway, Romania, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Poland, Greece, Spain and Russia.

The project aspires to better address the challenges and societal needs related to air quality in European cities. It responds to the urgent need to substantially reduce air pollution across the EU and to engage in a strategy to evaluate the health impacts of air pollution on citizens.

The project combines scientific and technical work to develop Service Tools that will support the capacity of the Air Quality Monitoring Networks (AQMNs) to evaluate, predict and provide observations to support policies to mitigate the impact of poor air quality on human health. This project addresses all aspects of sustainability, including efficient curation, preservation and provision of access to data, training and capacity building and the way the use of tools will be secured in the future.

A pilot implementation in 9 diverse cities is used to demonstrate the integration of complementary measurement systems and methods as well as data quality control, managing and communication using FAIR principles. The final goal is to provide upscaling and sustainability to interoperable services offered by Research Infrastructures, using advanced instrumentation, modelling and source apportionment, and integrating citizen’s observatories and mobile measurements. The project is developed in close consultation with stakeholders, including representatives of AQMNs, to increase the usefulness of the developed services and the likelihood of future incorporation of services in networks.