Our Roadmap to 2030Clean Air and Water
Creating a cleaner environment for all generations to come
Air Quality
Our target: By 2030, reduce the mortality rate from PM2.5 pollution exposure by 75% from the 2019 levels across the West Midlands.
Summary of latest findings:
- The percentage of mortality attributed to PM2.5 pollution exposure in the West Midlands increased from 2023 to 5.3% in 2024.
- This is a 27.4% decrease from 2019 levels, although there has been little change over the previous five years.
- All five subregions of the West Midlands experienced small increases in the percentage of mortality attributed to PM2.5 pollution exposure in 2024.
- The WMCA has the highest percentage of mortality attributed to PM2.5 pollution exposure (5.7%) whilst The Marches has the lowest (4.3%).
- The local authorities with the highest rates of mortality attributed to PM2.5 are Birmingham, Sandwell and Walsall, whilst the lowest rates are in Shropshire, Herefordshire and the Malvern Hills.
Progress: We currently rate progress on achieving our target as:
Water Quality
Our target: By 2030, restore 75% of waterbodies within the West Midlands to at least good ecological status.
Summary of latest findings:
- 2025 data show a small improvement to water quality since 2022, with 3.5% of waterbodies having good or high ecological status.
- This is still significantly below the 2030 target, and data on progress suggests that reaching the target is very unlikely.
- A change to the way the Environment Agency measures good ecological status means that all ecological factors must now be considered good before the overall status is confirmed as good. This means that there may have been progress to the overall quality of many waterbodies, even if they do not now count as good.
- 130 of the 372 waterbodies in the West Midlands are considered to have poor ecological status, and a further 19 have bad ecological status.
Progress: We currently rate progress on achieving our target as:
Consult the latest roadmap report for more details on this theme, how the target was derived and further background and information.
For details of which of our members work on this topic, visit our Members Directory.
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