Air Quality

Dr. Christina H. Fuller is an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Health at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health where she works in the field of air quality exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released its latest global urban air pollution database, including information for nearly 3,000 cities—a doubling from the 2014 database, which itself had data from 500 more cities than the previous (2011) iteration. These increases in coverage in air pollution measurement and reporting is encouraging, but the WHO numbers reveal that we still have a ways to go to construct a comprehensive and accurate picture of global air quality.

A proposed warehouse facility the size of 700 football fields has prompted at least 10 lawsuits, with critics saying it would mark a major setback in the fight to clean up Southern California’s dirty air – some of the most polluted in the country.

The Port of Los Angeles paid a Chinese government-owned shipping company $5 million in 2005 to equip cargo vessels to plug into electric shore power while at dock to keep their massive diesel engines from polluting neighborhoods near the harbor. The company, China Shipping, used the money to upgrade 17 ships, but the city didn't get all the promised environmental benefits. Most of the vessels stopped traveling to Los Angeles in 2010, a Times review of shipping industry data showed.

High levels of potentially harmful exhaust particles from jets using Los Angeles International Airport have been detected in a broad swath of densely populated communities up to 10 miles east of the runways, a new air quality study reported Thursday. The research, believed to be the most comprehensive of its type, found that takeoffs and landings at LAX are a major source of ultrafine particles. They are being emitted over a larger area than previously thought, the study states, and in amounts about equal in magnitude to those from a large portion of the county's freeways.

In a new report that ranks countries by how well they protect the environment, the U.S. comes in at a disappointing 26th place among 180 nations.

Confirming what Chicago-area commuters have experienced for years, federal regulators have documented spikes of lung- and heart-damaging pollution in the acrid blue clouds that hover between diesel locomotives at Union Station. ...

"The Chinese government likes to hold authority over data for fear that different numbers than those from official sources could lead to social unrest," says Angel Hsu, a professor with the Yale School of Forestry And Environmental Studies, who has researched the poor quality of Chinese data. "China claims they don't have the human capacity to maintain and run the monitors," she says. "But they were monitoring air quality for over a decade; they just didn't release it because they were worried that it would lead to social unrest."

Sarah Uhl leads CATF's team focused on minimizing emissions of potent, short-lived climate pollutants including methane and black carbon. She also serves as co-chair of the Methane Partners Campaign, which advocates for nationwide methane pollution standards for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Read more