by Hyon K. Rah – Chair, Environment & Sustainable Development Committee

May 2021

We have been managing through a pandemic for over a year now. Considering the suffering, loss, and disruption so many people are experiencing, it is difficult to think of anything that could possibly be considered a “silver lining.” That said, the pandemic has led to new insights in a range of fields. For example, stay-at-home orders demonstrated the impact human activities have on air quality and, given the chance, the speed at which air quality could be improved quite dramatically through the wide adoption of more sustainable practices, including clean energy. As I was researching for NFBPWC’s first Earth Day Summit (which took place on April 24^th), I was struck by these satellite images from NASA of India (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Annual level of airborne particles (aerosol) in India from 2016 to 2020. The frame “2020 Anomaly,” taken a week after a strict government-mandated lockdown, shows the lowest air pollution levels in 20 years.

These images show the annual level of airborne particles, or aerosol, with the red-orange shade indicating high levels of particle air pollution and the blue indicating low levels. The last frame, labeled “2020 Anomaly,” was taken just a week after the government placed the country of 1.3 billion under strict lockdown measures on March 25, 2020. The lockdown halted many industrial and economic activities, including travel by motor vehicles, industrial manufacturing/production, and burning of croplands. The airborne particle level in northern India in particular showed a marked improvement compared to the pollution levels of previous years and was the lowest since monitoring began 20 years ago.

While some aerosols do come from natural sources, such as dust storms, volcanic eruptions, and forest fires, human sources contribute most of the aerosols in our environment, according to the World Health Organization. It is also the aerosols from human sources that are more likely to do the most damage to human health because of their sheer volume and small particle size. While some airborne particles, such as soot, dust, and smoke, are dark or big enough to be visible to the human eye, most are not. The smaller the particle, the greater the potential for causing health problems, as very small particles are able to enter the lungs and even the bloodstream, impacting our lungs and hearts. Human sources of these aerosols include burning of croplands, the use of fossil fuels for motor vehicles and heat/power generation, and industrial facilities such as mines and oil refineries.

With many of these activities that generate airborne particles on pause due to the lockdown, air pollution eased to the point where the visibility through the air noticeably improved. In the northern Indian state of Punjab, over 100 miles away from the Himalayan Mountain range, the Himalayas became visible for the first time in decades (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Courtesy of @KangManjit via Twitter. “This was the view from our rooftop in Punjab India. For the first time in almost 30 years we can see the Himalayas due to India’s lockdown clearing air pollution.”

As we in the U.S. hopefully start to climb out of the depths of the pandemic, you may have heard more chatter about “building back better” and how infrastructure spending could be used in more climate and environment-friendly directions. My hope is that this insight about air quality—and the brief glimpse of the mountains—will serve as a motivator to support these kinds of environmentally-friendly infrastructure improvements and other measures that could improve air quality and, as a result, our health.

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https://www.who.int/airpollution/ambient/pollutants/en/

https://laqm.defra.gov.uk/public-health/pm25.html