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Engineering | Announcements | Science
October 24, 2022
A team led by researchers from the University of Washington compared three potential strategies to reduce inequities in fine particulate pollution across the USShutterstock
While air quality has improved dramatically over the past 50 years thanks in part to the Clean Air Act, people of color of all income levels in the United States are still exposed to higher than average levels of air pollution.
A team led by researchers from the University of Washington wanted to know if the Clean Air Act was capable of reducing these disparities or if a new approach would be needed. The team compared two approaches that mirror major aspects of the Clean Air Act and a third approach not commonly used to see if it would be better at addressing disparities across the contiguous US. The researchers used national emissions data to model each strategy: targeting specific sources of emissions across the US, requiring regions to adhere to specific concentration standards or reducing emissions in specific communities.
While the first two approaches—based on the Clean Air Act—did not eliminate disparities, the community-specific approach eliminated pollution disparities and overall reduced exposure to pollution.
The team published these findings on October 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“In earlier research, we wanted to know which sources of pollution were responsible for these disparities, but we found that almost all sources lead to unequal exposure.” So we thought, what will it take? Here, we tried three approaches to see which would work best to address these differences,” said senior author Julian Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of the World. “The two approaches that mirror aspects of the Clean Air Act have been quite weak in addressing the disparity. A third approach, targeting emissions to specific locations, is not common, but it’s something overburdened communities have been asking for years.
Fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, is less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – about 3% the diameter of a human hair. PM2.5 comes from vehicle exhaust; fertilizer and other agricultural emissions; production of electricity from fossil fuels; forest fires; and burning fuels such as wood, oil, diesel, gasoline, and coal. These tiny particles can lead to heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and other diseases, and are responsible for an estimated 90,000 deaths each year in the US
The researchers tested three potential strategies using a tool called InMAP, which Marshall and other co-authors developed. InMAP models the chemistry and physics of PM2.5, including how it forms in the atmosphere, how it disperses and how wind patterns move it from one location to another. The team modeled these approaches with national emissions data from 2014 because that was the most recent data set available at the time of this study.
The researchers looked at how efficiently and effectively each approach reduces average pollution exposure for all people and how well it eliminates disparities for people of color.
While emission source and concentration standards approaches have been successful in reducing overall exposure across the country, these methods have failed to address pollution disparities.
“Our optimization models what happens if we maximize disparity reduction.” If the approach cannot address disparities even when optimized to do so, then any real-world implementation of the approach will also fail to address disparities,” said lead author Yuzhou Wang, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering. “But we saw that even with less than a 1% reduction in site-specific emissions, pollution disparities that had persisted for decades were reduced to zero.”
Implementing this site-specific approach would require additional work to identify the locations that would be best targeted and work with the communities there to identify how to reduce emissions, the team said.
“Current regulations have improved average air pollution levels, but have not addressed structural inequities and have often ignored the voices and lived experiences of people in overburdened communities, including their demands to focus more attention on the sources that affect their communities,” Marshall said. “These findings reflect historical experience. Due to redlining and other racist urban planning from many decades ago, many sources of pollution are more likely to be located in black and brown communities. If we are to address current inequalities, we need an approach that reflects and acknowledges this historical context.”
Additional co-authors include Joshua Apte and Cesunica Ivey, both at the University of California, Berkeley; Jason Hill at the University of Minnesota; Regan Patterson of the University of California, Los Angeles; Allen Robinson at Carnegie Mellon University; and Christopher Tessum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This research was funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
For more information, contact Marshall at [email protected], Wang at [email protected], Ive at [email protected], and Patterson at [email protected]. Note Marshall is currently in Spain and nine hours ahead of Pacific Time. All other co-authors are Pacific Time.
The authors suggest that journalists reach out to environmental organizations and frontline communities as a way to include the voices of the people most affected by air pollution in stories. Possible additional contacts may include members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Grant number: R835873
Tags: Faculty of Engineering • Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering • Julian Marshall • Population Health • Yuzhou Wang
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