Brazil just revamped its national air pollution program. Its ultimate health and climate impact will depend on strong implementation

What’s new: Brazil recently adopted major updates to its national air pollution control program, Programa Nacional de Controle da Qualidade do Ar (PRONAR) — the operational key to meeting the country’s new health protective air quality standards set out by its 2024 National Air Quality Law. Some observers have dubbed the law “Brazil’s Clean Air Act,” reflecting its great potential to cut pollution and improve health nationwide. EDF and Clean Air Institute are  collaborating closely with Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change to help shape an implementation framework that’s built for results.

The overhauled PRONAR establishes a national framework that integrates monitoring, emissions inventories, policy planning tools and clear institutional roles across all levels of government. While the updates mark a major milestone, the key to the program’s ultimate success lies in its upcoming implementation phase.

Why it matters: The costs of air pollution in Brazil are high. It claims more than 60,000 lives prematurely and 3-5% of the country’s GDP every year. Tighter standards and more coordinated management will save lives, improve health for millions and boost Brazil’s economy. With its recent updates, PRONAR is better positioned to help Brazil more effectively align and coordinate its national air pollution efforts. But its ultimate impact will also depend on robust implementation that connects data, decisions, funding and enforcement.

A robust framework: what the new PRONAR gets right

The revised PRONAR establishes several building blocks of an effective national clean air policy that many countries struggle to put in place:

• A strong monitoring backbone that transforms the current system with real-time data collection and regular reporting requirements.
• A centralized digital platform called MonitorAr to organize and share up-to-date air quality information.
• Mandated emissions inventories and air quality management plans at the national and subnational levels.
• Clearer institutional roles across federal, state and municipal governments.
• A robust set of criteria for defining air quality management regions that reflect air pollution patterns, drawing from inputs like emissions inventories, monitoring data, meteorology, topography and atmospheric modeling.
• Cutting-edge monitoring tools, including an on-road vehicle emissions tracking program and new low-cost air quality sensors to complement regulation-grade monitors.
• More scientific rigor in data collection, including quality control requirements for monitoring stations and for providers of emission inventory data.

These updates to PRONAR set up a robust, coordinated air quality management system. Brazil’s next step is to get that system running at full capacity so it can deliver results.

Opportunities to ensure PRONAR delivers clean air?

Now that Brazil has adopted PRONAR, five areas stand out as critical opportunities to ensure it delivers maximum clean air and health benefits:

1. From health goals to health outcomes: PRONAR introduces health protection as an explicit objective. The implementation phase offers an opportunity to operationalize that commitment by integrating epidemiological data, quantifying the health benefits of clean air actions and using health indicators to track progress. Brazil already has environmental health surveillance systems; connecting them to PRONAR would amplify their impact.
2. Integrating health, climate and equity into air quality management: Effective implementation requires that health, climate and equity function as structural design principles across management instruments and critical air pollution episode plans. This means systematically addressing disparate pollution burdens across populations while tracking and communicating the co-benefits of reducing short-lived climate pollutants.
3. Building the financial and policy architecture for long term success: Durable implementation will require dedicated funding sources and economic incentives to scale action. These are not yet in place, but the implementation phase is the right moment to design them. They should include financing mechanisms aligned with the polluter-pays principle and with climate and health investment priorities.
4. Unlocking the full power of innovation: PRONAR authorizes some new technologies such as low-cost sensors, but implementation is a chance to expand further. Adding satellite data, remote sensing and advanced atmospheric modeling — now standard in modern air quality systems — would strengthen Brazil’s ability to monitor, enforce and plan.
5. Turning transparency into accountability: PRONAR strengthens access to information – a key to accountable systems. Brazil can build on this by creating clear mechanisms for public engagement, health-based risk communication and accountability that are tied to specific performance indicators, including health and exposure outcomes. This would empower communities to engage directly in the work of cleaning their air.

Where civil society and technical experts can help most

Now that PRONAR has been adopted, the focus shifts to implementation — a critical stage where support from technical, academic and civil society groups like ours can have the greatest impact. Here are the priority areas where we believe that support can help most:

• Making health outcomes measurable: propose health indicators, methods to quantify benefits and ways to link MonitorAr with health metrics to track exposure and outcomes.
• Strengthening technical standards: encourage strengthening of clear quality control norms, emissions inventory methods and transparent evaluation metrics.
• Advancing clean solutions metrics: develop and promote methodologies to track the displacement of polluting technologies and the uptake of low- and zero-emission alternatives, providing the evidence base needed to track progress and inform policy.
• Translating innovation into policy-ready tools: encourage use of a strong mix of air quality monitoring methods, including reference stations, low-cost sensors and satellites, and demonstrate how modeling can support enforcement and planning. EDF’s Air Tracker tool and our emerging Air Insights suite both offer value in this area.
• Strengthening regional capacity and implementation expertise: support states and municipalities, especially in high-burden regions, to develop localized emission inventories and air quality management plans and technical and institutional tools needed to ensure PRONAR delivers measurable results on the ground.
• Offering tangible funding options: help design funding approaches consistent with polluter-pays principles and align clean-air priorities with climate finance and health-sector investment.

What’s next: Two big next steps will significantly shape PRONAR’s ultimate effectiveness as a national air quality management system: the National Emissions Inventory (currently being prepared by the Ministry) and the National Air Quality Management Plan with a 20-year horizon (required within two years of the inventory).

EDF’s focus in this next phase centers on four fronts:

• Providing technical support to shape PRONAR’s implementation guidelines that will define the system’s standards;
• Ensuring health and environmental justice considerations are embedded in planning and monitoring tools;
• Advancing action on short-lived climate pollutants, whose reduction delivers immediate benefits for both climate and public health;
• Deploying Air Insights to strengthen data access and decision-making.

Working alongside the Ministry and in partnership with Clean Air Institute and Instituto Ar — who is supporting robust stakeholder engagement throughout the process — EDF is committed to helping Brazil turn a strong framework into measurable results for the people most affected by air pollution across the nation.

Sergio Sánchez is Senior Policy Director, Global Clean Air at Environmental Defense Fund. Juliana Klakamp is Chief Operating Officer at Clean Air Institute.