Hello everyone! For the first part of my blog, I would be exploring more on air pollution. Specifically, I would be focusing on outdoor air pollution. The World Health Organisation defines air pollution as the contamination of both the indoor and outdoor atmosphere by any form of substance, such that its natural characteristics have been altered. Some widely known sources of outdoor air pollution include the combustion engines of motor vehicles, air travel, and forest fires.
Here’s a video that nicely summarizes the different types of outdoor air pollution: Air Pollution 101 | National Geographic
Before we begin delving deeper into how outdoor air pollution has changed during this COVID-19 pandemic, I believe that it is important to set the context — How was life before the pandemic? Although it had only been about 3 years since the pandemic began, it feels almost like a lifetime ago when there were no capacity restrictions when we dined out or when we could travel to another country relatively easily. Hence, this post is like a trip down memory lane to explore how global and local outdoor air quality was like before COVID-19 happened.
According to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (n.d.), there were about 4.5 billion passengers in the aviation industry in 2019. This was about 3.6% higher than that of 2018. It is no wonder that the flights caused 915 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2019 globally (ATAG, 2020). On land, the vehicle industry is a major source of outdoor air pollution in many countries. For example, Beijing faces a severe outdoor air pollution problem and this is largely caused by its transport industry. Despite having several measures put in place, such as vehicle travel restriction policy and vehicle emissions standards, this outdoor air pollution problem continues to plague the city (Yang and He, 2016).
Evidently, outdoor air pollution was a serious concern that troubled cities and countries way before the pandemic began. It seemed as though we were going down the rabbit hole, getting deeper every year. Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic was the game-changer in all of this. Before I end off today’s post, here’s some food for thought for everyone – did outdoor air pollution worsen or improve during the COVID-19 pandemic?
That’s all folks, till next time!
References
ATAG, 2020. Facts & Figures. Facts & figures. Available at: https://www.atag.org/facts-figures.html#:~:text=Worldwide%2C%20flights%20produced%20915%20million,43%20billion%20tonnes%20of%20CO2.
ICAO, n.d. The World of Air Transport in 2019. Available at: https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2019/Pages/the-world-of-air-transport-in-2019.aspx