Posts in the 'Air Quality' category
I’ve watched in horror as Europe burns. Ferocious wildfires have swept through Spain, France and now Greece, scorching towns and forests and spewing toxic smoke. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. Many will have little left to return to. European ...
When torrential rains hit Kinshasa in April 2025, the city of 20 million came to a standstill. Floodwaters submerged more than half the city as the Ndjili River and smaller streams overflowed, quickly overwhelming the city’s drainage capacity. Lives were ...
Every day, millions of children ride to school in diesel buses that expose them to pollution linked to serious health issues. Replacing those buses with electric models has benefits that go far beyond a quieter ride and cleaner air. Electric ...
Air pollution is one of the most serious environmental threats to human health worldwide. In 2021, it caused 8.1 million deaths, an increase from 7 million recorded in previous studies. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, the infant mortality rate from ...
Twenty years ago, the forested slopes above Alpine Acres — a small community at the source of the Weber River in Summit County, Utah — were overgrown with dry brush and primed for wildfire. With only one road in and ...
AI tools like ChatGPT, navigation apps and streaming platforms feel effortless, drawing information seemingly from thin air. Yet the infrastructure behind them is anything but invisible. Across the country, a surge of new data centers is reshaping local energy grids, ...
If global shipping were a country, it would rank among the world’s top six emitters of climate-harming gases (GHGs). Eighty percent of international trade — fundamental to the global economy and the goods we use in our everyday lives — travels by sea from ...
Nestled in the Andes, Bogotá’s mountainous landscape traps air pollutants, sometimes cloaking the Colombian capital in a dusty smog. The consequences have been severe. The city’s poor air quality resulted in an estimated 2,300 excess deaths in 2019. In 2023, ...
Steve Easterday would start and end the school year with the windows open. In the fall and spring, when the weather turned temperate in central Tennessee, his passengers – Putnam County School students of all ages – would slide down ...
India’s urban centers are grappling with a severe air pollution crisis that poses a significant threat to public health and urban livability. Studies suggest that each year, Delhi records approximately 12,000 air pollution-related deaths, accounting for 11.5% of its total fatalities. Despite ...
Wildfires have been rapidly spreading across the Los Angeles area since Jan. 7, displacing upwards of 175,000 people and claiming at least five lives as of Jan. 9. The Palisades fire — the first to erupt and the biggest blaze ...
On July 22, the world experienced its hottest day in recorded history. The global average temperature reached 17.2 degrees C (62.9 degrees F), prompting UN Secretary-General António Guterres to issue a global call to action on extreme heat. The problem of extreme ...
Research around the world shows that pollution levels can vary enormously within the same city and even within the same neighborhood. Local monitoring data can thus prove essential to understanding air pollution sources, how they affect different communities and groups, ...
On a Sunday afternoon in September 2023, a group of about 30 individuals, including a group of mostly female neighbors from nine kampungs (a common term for “urban villages” or “informal settlements” across multiple languages and nations in Southeast Asia) ...
With growing urban populations and increases in cars, trucks and buses, cities are poised to experience more harmful pollution threatening people’s health and livelihoods. But some cities around the world are turning to an emerging solution called zero-emission zones (ZEZs). These are designated ...
