Tag Archives: air pollution

Viewpoints: Top Ten Most Viewed Articles of 2015

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  1. Dana Boyer, Stefanie Brodie, Joshua Sperling, Eleanor Stokes & Alisa Zomer | Implementing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal in Atlanta and Delhi
  2. Federico Caprotti | Building the smart city: Moving beyond the critiques 
  3. Alexander Aylett | Green cities and smart cities: The potential and pitfalls of digitally-enabled green urbanism
  4. Chiara Certoma and Francesco Rizzi | Smart cities for smart citizens: Enabling urban transitions through crowdsourcing
  5. Patricia Romero-Lankao and Daniel Gnatz | Do cities have the institutional capacity to address climate change?
  6. Harini Nagendra | Ecologically-smart cities: Keeping urban ecosystems centre stage in India’s Smart Cities programme
  7. Emma Arnold and Karen O’Brien | The Art of Urban Transformations
  8. Olivia Bina and Andrea Ricci | Building scenarios for sustainable urbanisation: Balancing ‘can’, ‘need’ & ‘want’ 
  9. Andres Luque-Ayala | Urbanization and global environmental change: A matter of politics?
  10. Tracey Holloway | What’s next for air quality in the United States?

A huge thank you to our generous authors and dedicated readers!

Viewpoints: What’s Next for Air Quality in the United States?

Tracey Holloway
University of Wisconsin, USA

Whether you remember the 1970s, Air Pollutionor – like me – have seen hazy skylines in movies like Rocky, you may notice something has changed. The U.S., like many other industrialized countries, has drastically cleaner air today than in decades past.

A layer of haze used to be a common part of city life. While occasional bad air days still occur throughout the U.S., on most days, in most cities, the air is clear and and for the most part healthy. If you could breathe that ‘70s air, you would feel the difference in your lungs, your eyes, and your life expectancy

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Viewpoints: Solving Urban Air Pollution through an Interdisciplinary Approach

Beijing, ChinaMegan Melamed, International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) Project, USA

In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) projected that by 2050 air pollution will be the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide, surpassing dirty water and lack of sanitation. However, the World Health Organization recently reported that in 2012 approximately 7 million people died as a result of exposure to air pollution, making it the world’s largest single environmental risk, 38 years earlier than projected by OECD. Many urban areas in both emerging and developed countries continually exceed the 2005 World Health Organization (WHO) Air Quality Standards. The map below shows urban areas that exceed the WHO standard for annual average PM10 of <20 µg/m3 (only the urban areas with green dots are meeting the WHO standard).

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