The director of planning and sustainable development at the city of Dakar announced, Wednesday June 12, 2024, the upcoming implementation of an air quality management plan in the Senegalese capital.
“(…) we wanted to go in depth to do our diagnostic study on air quality. We do not intend to limit ourselves there, we plan to develop and release in a few days the air quality management plan, because the time is for action,” declared Abdoulaye Sylla who spoke during the a sharing workshop on communication around air quality.
He recalled that after meetings organized three years ago, most of the municipalities of Dakar made air quality a priority.
“We worked with our partner C40, which is a network of mayors of large cities, to be supported in the development of the terms of reference and to move towards the development of this plan,” he explained.
According to him, the objective is to ensure that each Dakar resident has an action to implement to jointly succeed in the challenge of a city committed to clean air, by 2035.
He points out that “there are a lot of sectors in which we must raise awareness among populations in order to weigh this very alarming content of atmospheric pollutants (…)”.
“The purpose of communication is to be able to reach a much larger audience, which is the population and the community as a whole, with its different representations,” said Simon Sambou, advisor to the C40 network in Africa. from West.
According to him, this communication strategy is a continuous process, “from planning to implementation, to reduce the level of vulnerability of populations”.
“In this process, we estimated together with the city that developing an air quality management plan, the first of its kind for it, was a priority, but another would be to accompany it with a strategic plan of communication, because the two go together,” explained Simon Sambou.
“I am delighted with this opportunity that we had to start things together from the beginning to collect the data and make the necessary diagnosis on air pollution in Dakar,” said Amadou Thierno. Gaye, professor at the atmospheric laboratory of the Ecole supérieure polytechnique of UCAD.
He affirmed that knowing the origin of pollution makes it possible to assess its negative impact, from an economic and human point of view.
“Now that we know where we are, what the negative impact of air pollution is on health and the economy, we must now promote it, so that Dakar becomes a clean air city for the 2035 objective,” he concluded.
Moctar FICUU / VivAfrik
