To work out the factors we should be worried about, and how we can intervene, we need to rethink how we measure what’s going on.
- Rod Jones
Rush hour can be maddening. Roads congested with traffic, public transport overcrowded, pavements heaving with people. But as well as the frustration, there’s a sinister side to the commute to work: every breath you take could be adding to your risk of dying prematurely.
Air pollution is the world’s largest single environmental health risk, causing one in every eight deaths according to figures released last year by the World Health Organization. In the UK, 30,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of poor air quality, and it costs the NHS and wider economy many billions each year.
Traffic is the main culprit; however, industry, domestic heating, power generation and burning are all contributors to pollution. And although the effects of pollution might be noticeable on a particularly smoggy day in a large city, decades of exposure to only slightly higher levels – a level we wouldn’t even notice – can increase the risk of heart and lung diseases, stroke and cancer.
“To work out the factors we should be worried about, and how we can intervene, we need to rethink how we measure what’s going on,” explains atmospheric scientist Professor Rod Jones.
In the UK, the Automatic Urban and Rural Network provides valuable hour-by-hour assessments of air quality. But with only 171 monitoring stations at fixed sites nationwide, large areas of the country remain uncovered. Cost is the main limitation to developing a higher density network.
With this in mind, Jones’ team, together with industrial partners and other universities, has been developing low-cost pollution detectors that are small enough to fit in your pocket, stable enough to be installed as long-term static detectors around a city, and sensitive enough to detect small changes in air quality on a street-by-street basis. Their findings are now informing research projects aimed at improving air quality in major cities across Europe and North America.
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Image: Pollution sensor
Credit Rod Jones
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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