Tunisia has issued a new environmental protection law that cracks heavily on air pollution from factories and vehicles. specifying financial fines and imposing the polluters to join a pollution monitoring network at their expense.

The Tunisian Parliament and Council of Advisors recently passed a law instituting mandatory measures for monitoring air quality and delineating a series of hard penalties to be imposed on all violators. Section 13 of the law states that the owner of a firm not using technological equipment “for preventing and limiting air pollution at the source” shall be fined 1,000 to 50,000 dinars. The new law requires firms operating in one of a list of air polluting activities to “[join] the National Network for Monitoring Air Quality at their own expense.
The new law punishes transgressions with fines ranging from 100 dinars to 10,000 dinars for each person whose firm exceeds the maximum limits for pollution emissions.

According to a report distributed to Parliament last spring, the transportation sector is considered one of the biggest air polluters in Tunisia. It alone accounts for 31% of national energy consumption.
A World Bank study on the costs of environmental degradation in Tunisia revealed that these costs amount to 2.1% of GDP, close to the results for developed nations; according to the World Bank report, the costs of environmental degradation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries ranges between 1% and 1.9%, whereas the percentage in the Arab and southern Mediterranean countries ranges between 3% and 6%.

Since October 2005, the government has installed ten lighted signs displaying data from the National Network for Monitoring Air Quality. In 2004 the Ministry of Environment decided to purchase four mobile labs and to dedicate 25 fixed stations to monitoring air quality in all wilayas of the republic, particularly industrial centres and high-traffic areas.