Clean Air for All: Assessment and Mitigation of Urban Air Pollution

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Poor air quality is associated with 8.8 million premature deaths and $114B in social costs per year globally. In this NSERC Discovery research program, we will use advanced measurement methods coupled with data mining to better understand emission sources and the resulting exposure of Canadians to air pollution. We will examine traffic related air pollution as this is a priority in Canada; one third of Canadians live close enough to major roads to be potentially impacted. We will investigate the smallest particles emitted from vehicle tailpipes and how these interact with other pollutants already present in the atmosphere. We will explore the increase in recent years in particle emissions from vehicle brakes and tires. We will also evaluate how the reduction in traffic contributed to the improvement in air quality during the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, and why this differed for different pollutants and in different cities. We will explore new approaches to understanding how exposure to air pollution varies geographically and over time, and apply them nationally and locally, with a focus on evaluating the exposure of people who are potentially more vulnerable people. In particular, we will further develop our AirSENCETM air quality monitoring technology, deploy networks of these sensors-based instruments, and develop new strategies for mining the data we collect. We will examine how the chemical reactivity of ambient particles differs across 40 Canadian cities and how it has changed over the last decade, in order to identify underlying relationships with particle composition and the mixtures of sources in different cities. This research will contribute new fundamental knowledge and further develop technology to support needed policy development by federal, provincial and municipal governments. Our findings will help identify air quality benefits achieved through Ontario's new policy to reduce emissions from trucks. Moreover, they will provide knowledge to evaluate the need for Canada to develop policy around "non-tailpipe" emission from brakes and tires. This research will inform the long-term gains in air quality that can potentially be achieved through future policy changes to promote sustainability, and whether Canada's current air quality monitoring will readily be able to quantify these improvements. Overall this NSERC Discovery program will provide new knowledge needed to reduce the health burden of exposure to air pollution.