Analysis

The deadly challenge of air pollution in cities

Approximately 8 million people die every year from poor air quality - many of whom live in Asia.

AUTHOR

Peter White

READ TIME

4 min

Around 8 million people die every year from poor air quality, many of them in Asia, where 4 billion people – 92% of Asia and the Pacific’s population – are exposed to life threatening atmospheric pollution.*

With population growth and rapid urbanisation, harmful air quality impacts on citizens within Asia’s cities are getting worse.

The levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are now at their highest levels for millions of years while the inhabitants of 98% of cities in low and middle-income countries with populations above 100,000 are breathing heavily polluted air. 

The need to translate air quality data into action in cities

Removing all dangerous pollutants from the air breathed in Asia’s cities should be a long-term target, but is not practical in the short-term. There is however a clear need to start the process and a first step is to be able to identify the main sources and particularly those which can be controlled.

It is vital that cities move beyond the existing scenarios where a few generic air quality sensors are used to provide an indication of the general air quality. Dense monitoring networks and specifically designed software is required to provide adequate information to allow for action which can have real impacts.

Our team at Envirosuite is currently developing a platform that provides a unified solution to city environmental authorities which includes a variety of particle, gas and odour sensors, allowing a much deeper and accurate understanding of the many sources of poor air quality in an urban environment.

Smart Cities solution to debut at InterAir Singapore

I’m pleased to announce that we will be debuting our Smart Cities solution at Asia’s leading Air Quality Event, InterAir on March 27-28. The on focus this year’s InterAir Conference is  ‘The Deadly Challenge of Air Pollution’.

Our new Smart Cities solution is being used by the Kuwait EPA to take action to protect citizens from the harmful effects of poor air quality. The unified platform currently monitors, visualises and analyses odours and air quality impacts from industrial operations around Kuwait City to quantify its impact on citizens.

Needless to say, we’re excited to show the solution to other cities at InterAir. We believe that it will also empower them to take action to reduce harm to citizens in their cities.

We will be also presenting the capabilities of our Smart Cities solution capabilities to city managers and environmental regulatory authorities around Asia on Day 1 of the conference in the 17:00 Session. Our talk will be entitled “Environmental Intelligence platform for odour and air quality management of smart cities”.

If you are in Singapore, we would love it if you could drop by. It’s free to attend the conference and we will be showing our new solution’s capabilities in an interactive demo at our booth.

If you can’t make it, get in touch with us and we would be happy to organise a time with you to show you how our new solution can benefit cities everywhere.

*Sourced from World Health Organisation