US Embassies May Have Accidentally Improved Air Quality
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2008, the United States embassy in Beijing installed an air-quality monitor and started tweeting out its findings every hour. Since then, these monitors have popped up in more than 50 embassies in countries and cities around the globe. Something unexpected happened in each of the cities in which the monitors appeared. Researchers found that, overall, air quality improved in the cities where embassies were tweeting out air-quality data. "We were surprised," Akshaya Jha, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the paper's authors, told Ars. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019, more than 90 percent of the world's population lived in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Further, according to Jha's paper, this phenomenon tends to be worse in low- and middle-income countries. However, air-quality monitoring in those countries is quite rare. Work on this research began around a year ago. Jha's team wanted to look at something completely different: the impacts that improvements in air pollution had on hazard pay among embassy workers. However, when the team began studying the literature, they couldn't find good information on reductions in air pollution relative to when embassies started their monitoring in many locations. As such, they began looking into it themselves. To study this, they used satellite data to look at air pollution in 466 cities in 136 countries, of which 50 cities across 36 countries received the air-quality monitors by 2020. They looked at the air pollution in all of these cities in the years before and after the monitors were installed, using the years prior to installation and the cities that did not receive monitors as controls. The research found that the cities that had a US embassy that set up one of these monitors and tweeted out air-quality data saw a decrease of PM2.5 particulates to the tune of 2 to 4 micrograms per cubic meter -- compared to their air quality before getting the monitor and to other similar cities that do not have a monitor.
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