Quantifying the impact of renewable energy technology and policy interventions on air pollution and climate

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My research is focused on tackling some of the greatest societal challenges we currently face: improving air quality and mitigating climate change in an increasingly globalized, urban world. Many sources of air pollutants are co-emitters of climate-forcing agents, such as greenhouse gases and black carbon, and thus air quality and climate science are intricately related fields, which may be effectively co-managed using well-crafted environmental policy. For example, policies to incentivize fueling heavy-duty trucks with natural gas may simultaneously reduce tailpipe and greenhouse gas emissions. However, the effectiveness of any given policy decision on air quality and climate outcomes is often difficult to quantify using traditional laboratory-based research as the laboratory poorly represents real-world behaviour. Thus, it is critical that we develop real-world based tools to quickly and quantitatively assess the impact of our policy decisions on air and climate outcomes, and use the knowledge gained to support better policy planning. ******As part of my long-term research vision, I plan on developing and applying instruments to obtain reliable and quantitative data in support of better air and climate policy. Together with HQP, I propose two studies using real-world monitoring tools to quantify the impact of policy interventions and technology on air and climate-relevant pollutant reductions. The studies will be conducted in two diverse environments, Vancouver, British Columbia and a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India to demonstrate the broad applicability of the methods. The studies will address emissions from the transportation sector and indoor air pollution from household combustion, two major sources of air pollutants and climate forcing agents. Both will use the same low-cost air quality sensors, an emerging air quality monitoring technology that comprise a mix of commercially available and research sensors. The use of low-cost air quality sensors for monitoring enables denser networks at a comparable cost to the existing regime. Furthermore, these sensors are compact and have a low power demand, allowing them to be moved with relative ease to rural areas or developing regions where limited resources and infrastructure exist.******The data collected during the studies will be extrapolated to city and regional scale systems to forecast the impact on air and climate outcomes. Technologies will also be tuned to identify optimal configurations and these recommendations will be summarized for Canadian and global policymakers to support writing more impactful and efficient policy to protect our air and climate. Furthermore, the sensor technology and data analysis tools developed and applied in my program will provide assessments in near real-time, enabling the community to iterate or improve policies more quickly, improving the overall effectiveness of our environmental policies.