The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded Birmingham a $1 million grant to study the impact of air pollution.

The Birmingham City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday accepting the grant funds from EPA.

The assistance from the Air and Radiation Climate Pollution Reduction grant program is intended to help formulate a climate action plan for the city and region. Birmingham and the Regional Planning Commission will use the grant to create a plan to address air pollution.

“This is a grant to produce a climate action plan for the entire Birmingham MSA (Metropolitan Standard Area),” said Amelia Muller, civic design principal for the City of Birmingham. “Through these funds, we will put together a preliminary climate action plan in early 2024 and then follow that by a comprehensive climate action plan that we’ll submit to the EPA in 2025.”

The plan will help attract more federal funding in the future, she said.

“This planning exercise is essentially a prerequisite for then pursuing any implementation dollars from the EPA under this same program,” Muller said. “It’s setting the baseline on a number of metrics that we will then be eligible to pursue implementation dollars for.”

The plan will focus on key measures of greenhouse gas reduction and pollution reduction for industries, Muller said. “This is focused more around air pollution,” she said.

“This is an issue, air pollution, that impacts a big part of the communities that I represent,” said Birmingham City Council member J.T. Moore. “I’m very interested in seeing the results of this study, considering the amount of heavy industry that we have near residential neighborhoods. We need all the help we can get to help remediate the impacts of this pollution in our neighborhoods.”