Air pollution causes a massive amount of morbidity and mortality.
Air pollution is something outside of the individual control (unlike, say, alcohol or tobacco consumption), and therefore policy work seems to a particularly important and tractable approach.
What I am unsure about:
I wonder whether a lack of information about the levels of pollution and its causes is a significant barrier to policy change. Intuitively to me, it seems like we know the things that cause air pollution and areas where air pollution is worse, and additional data on this is unlikely to make a massive difference to the likelihood of policy change. I’m not too confident about this, however, and would love to hear your thoughts otherwise.
Improved air quality monitoring seems like it could be really useful for:
Holding governments with already existing policies for air quality accountable e.g. if a government has a policy to keep the level of air pollution below a certain level, having a lot of monitors would make it a lot easier to check whether this was the case, and hopefully drive up compliance
This is a fairly neglected area imo, and it is great to see more people thinking about it :)
There are a couple good reasons to think that more fine grained monitoring could be effective. For one thing, PM2.5 conditions are often much more localized than we realize, so some neighborhoods and microregions are exposed to much higher conditions than others. And they are time-dependent, meaning that some days and times that are much worse than others. So this more fine grained data can improve our understanding of the hardest hit regions at the neighborhood level, while giving local residents better information as well—imagine if everyone had the kind of understanding of air quality conditions that Bay Area residents have during wildfires.
I also think it’s possible that better local monitoring creates its own momentum, since local residents now have quantifiable proof of their air quality conditions. It’s possible that this kind of information would elevate the issue to a more pressing political priority in the hardest-hit areas, though I am still uncertain about that.
Hey, a great write-up!
Completely agree that:
Air pollution causes a massive amount of morbidity and mortality.
Air pollution is something outside of the individual control (unlike, say, alcohol or tobacco consumption), and therefore policy work seems to a particularly important and tractable approach.
What I am unsure about:
I wonder whether a lack of information about the levels of pollution and its causes is a significant barrier to policy change. Intuitively to me, it seems like we know the things that cause air pollution and areas where air pollution is worse, and additional data on this is unlikely to make a massive difference to the likelihood of policy change. I’m not too confident about this, however, and would love to hear your thoughts otherwise.
Improved air quality monitoring seems like it could be really useful for:
Holding governments with already existing policies for air quality accountable e.g. if a government has a policy to keep the level of air pollution below a certain level, having a lot of monitors would make it a lot easier to check whether this was the case, and hopefully drive up compliance
This is a fairly neglected area imo, and it is great to see more people thinking about it :)
Thanks Akhil!
There are a couple good reasons to think that more fine grained monitoring could be effective. For one thing, PM2.5 conditions are often much more localized than we realize, so some neighborhoods and microregions are exposed to much higher conditions than others. And they are time-dependent, meaning that some days and times that are much worse than others. So this more fine grained data can improve our understanding of the hardest hit regions at the neighborhood level, while giving local residents better information as well—imagine if everyone had the kind of understanding of air quality conditions that Bay Area residents have during wildfires.
I also think it’s possible that better local monitoring creates its own momentum, since local residents now have quantifiable proof of their air quality conditions. It’s possible that this kind of information would elevate the issue to a more pressing political priority in the hardest-hit areas, though I am still uncertain about that.