Europe has made important strides in updating its ambient air quality rules and building law, but the places where we spend 90% of our lives still lack a dedicated, harmonised EU framework for indoor air quality (IAQ). The revised Ambient Air Quality Directive (EU 2024/2881) tightens outdoor limits for 12 pollutants and brings targets closer to WHO guidance, but it does not set binding indoor limits. The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EU 2024/1275) now embeds indoor environmental quality (IEQ) alongside energy and climate goals, referencing ventilation, monitoring, and inspection provisions, a crucial step toward aligning energy efficiency with health protection. Both directives must be transposed into national law over the course of 2026, a process that risks uneven implementation across Europe. This is a unique opportunity to transform minimum legal obligations into a right- and science-based European framework for IAQ that sets clear pollutant thresholds, mandates ventilation and filtration, and ensures monitoring, enforcement, and financing mechanisms that guarantee healthy indoor air for everyone. Such a framework would protect those in schools, hospitals, workplaces and homes, and ensure that the benefits of clean indoor air are accessible to all, not just those who can afford expensive renovations.
This is a European perspective, but Europe is not alone in the challenge of securing healthy indoor air. Around the world, indoor air pollution remains a major health risk linked to cooking with solid fuels and kerosene, to unsafe heating sources, as well as to elevated ambient PM2.5 levels that penetrate indoors in cities with severe smog. According to WHO, household air pollution contributes to millions of premature deaths annually, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, underscoring the urgency of indoor air interventions that go beyond Europe’s context. After COVID-19, we know that ventilation and filtration are critical parts of public-health preparedness infrastructure, essential to protect populations from airborne infections. With the climate crisis intensifying wildfires and extreme heat worldwide, more and more smoke and pollution are pushed indoors. New evidence shows just how easily these pollutants infiltrate buildings, making indoor air quality a frontline issue for climate adaptation and health equity.
Europe has a unique opportunity, and responsibility, to act as a global standard-setter. When the EU leads with ambitious, science-based rules, they often become the reference point for standards and product design beyond its border. This is why we are calling to adopt a rights-based, health-driven indoor air framework, so that Europe can improve health at home while helping to drive scientific and legal innovation for other regions to take inspiration from.
Healthy air is a human right, and indoor air is no exception. It should be a shared global goal to make sure that this right is adequately and urgently enshrined, providing stronger legal tools for people to claim protections against environmental harms, including poor indoor air. We call on partners around the world, policymakers, scientists, civil society, industry, to step up with concrete standards, legal frameworks, and action.
Our commitments
Our Director General, Dr Milka Sokolovic has signed the Healthy Indoor Air Global Pledge and will speak at the Showcase Event on Healthy Indoor Air to contribute to the conversation on how to convert standards and science into enforceable policy.
EPHA will champion:
- A European Framework for Indoor Air Quality, ensuring consistent health-protective standards across all Member States for indoor air quality.
- Strong source control policies, tackling emissions at their root by setting strict pollutant concentration limits, reducing ambient emissions across all sectors, and rapidly phasing out high-emitting combustion appliances for cooking and heating to protect health and cut greenhouse gases.
- Ventilation and filtration as public-health infrastructure, scaling up requirements that safeguard the most vulnerable (children, low-income households, people with chronic conditions) while strengthening Europe’s climate resilience and pandemic preparedness.