Ethics & Legal impacts

Air pollution is a critical global health issue, significantly contributing to the burden of respiratory diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Cystic Fibrosis (CF). The REMEDIA project explores the interplay between environmental stressors, socio-economic conditions, and health outcomes, aiming to guide effective and equitable public health policies. While much research has focused on medical and environmental impacts, fewer studies have addressed the ethical and legal dimensions of interventions aimed at reducing air pollution.

To fill this gap, this tool employed a qualitative research design, conducting semi-structured interviews with 23 experts from 14 European countries, spanning disciplines in public health, ethics, and law. This methodology enabled rich, interdisciplinary insights into complex questions concerning individual rights, public good, and the fairness of policy implementation. The semi-structured format allowed experts to focus on their area of expertise while engaging in open dialogue about broader issues such as justice, autonomy, and regulatory legitimacy.

A text-mining approach was used to analyze the interview data, leveraging the Alceste software and Factorial Correspondence Analysis to detect thematic patterns, shared concerns, and subtle nuances across expert responses. This systematic analysis helped uncover both consensus areas and contentious issues, highlighting how ethical and legal considerations must be integral to designing effective public health strategies.

This methodology proves especially valuable for evaluating interventions where individual liberties may be restricted for collective benefit, such as emission regulations or smoking bans. It provides a replicable, interdisciplinary framework to assess how policies can be ethically justified and legally supported, ensuring that health protection measures are both effective and socially acceptable. This methodological approach contributes to inform not only respiratory disease prevention, but also offer a model for ethically grounded policymaking in broader environmental health contexts.