Cape Town aims to have the cleanest air in all of Africa.

A comprehensive air quality management plan was launched yesterday with the aim of ridding Cape Town of its notorious “brown haze” and making it the city with the cleanest air in Africa.

Some of the objectives of the 11-point plan include improving air quality in all informal settlements in the city and targeting vehicle emissions, which make up about 60% of the brown haze phenomenon encountered over the Cape Peninsula at times. Cape Town, which has been monitoring air quality since 1958, is at the forefront of combating air pollution.

The city has been proactive in starting its own air quality management system, which has been taken up in recent national air quality legislation. Dr Ivan Bromfield, manager of specialised health services in the city, said the plan would use all the tools and methods available internationally to ensure a proper and specific integrated system.

Another objective was to specify the ambient air quality standards for Cape Town, which uses guidelines set by the World Health Organisation.The city already has a pilot programme running in Khayelitsha to improve air quality there. The lessons learned from the project would be used in other programmes in other areas, said Bromfield.

Other objectives include enforcing current and future legislation around air quality and compiling an emissions database to establish the sources of air pollution. The database would be used to do modelling around the pollution problem and to provide information on which the authorities could take action, said Bromfield. The vehicle emissions programme has identified a number of sites at which free emission testing can take place.

Although random roadside testing of diesel vehicles is carried out at these sites within the boundaries of the city, it has been established that many vehicles are not caught in the net as they do not operate on the routes where testing sites were located. Bromfield said in future the city would also consider the effect of land use and transport planning where new industrial complexes were considered and new roads were built. The city would also use the plan to determine the health effects of air quality to identify trends and remedies.