Preliminary assessment of air quality in Pancevo

The Republic of Serbia is trying to harmonize the draft law on Air Protection with relevant EU Directives. The Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea (IMELS) is supporting Serbia in this process. In this framework the Institute for Atmospheric Pollution of the National Research Council (IIA-CNR) carried out the preliminary assessment of air quality in Pan?evo, in accordance with the EU legislation with the aim to: - Preliminarily assess air quality and thus obtain a clearer picture of the actual situation; - Assess the population exposure to the monitored pollutants; - Assess the relative contribution of different pollution sources; - Design the permanent monitoring network; - Provide the basis for further action. The overall objective was to support Local Institutions in the development of an air quality management system including monitoring, environmental policies and specific instruments to implement these policies. Eight two-week campaigns (two for each season) were carried out in 2005-2006, by using passive samplers for NO2, NOx, SO2, NH3, BTX, O3 and Total Non Methanic Hydrocarbons. The results coming from the passive samplers were interpolated to create distribution maps. The study showed that benzene represents the most significant pollutant and furthermore that the city of Pan?evo may be divided into two parts affected by different sources: the industrial zone, including the residential area of Vojlovica, strongly influenced by the facility emissions and the urban area influenced by local emissions, such as traffic and domestic heating and also to a lesser extent by the industrial emissions. Taking into account such results, the air quality monitoring network was designed.