Delhi Trying to Stop Stubble Burning

The Central Pollution Control board (CPCB) on Sunday convened a meeting of all member secretaries to devise an action plan to “effectively” and “strictly” monitor any incidence of burning of crop stubble in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. The phenomenon, which impacts the whole of north India can be substantially reduced, if not stopped, only if states coordinate better with each other, say experts. “This phenomenon begins to appear from around the second week of October. Despite a ban on burning wheat and paddy residue, farmers have been found flouting the norm. The respective authorities even send notices but to no avail. Hence, every state has been asked to heighten its vigil,” said an official who was present at the CPCB meeting. Read the full article @ Hindustan Times

Also see, what's polluting Delhi's air?

Kolkata Ranked 4th Worst Polluted City

Coarse dust particles - a byproduct of construction activities - have made Kolkata the fourth most polluted ‘megacity’ in the world, a recent report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) claims. While the report has placed Delhi at the top of the list, Cairo and Dhaka occupy the second and third positions respectively. Kolkata comes fourth just ahead of Mumbai. Read more @ Hindustan Times and track pollution in your city with this real-time air quality map

According to the report the PM10 level in Kolkata during this pseriod was nearly seven times the limit prescribed by WHO. If one considers the Indian safety limits, which is less stringent, Kolkata’s PM10 pollution level is more than double. These particles can cause asthma attacks, aggravate bronchitis and other lung diseases, and reduce the body’s ability to fight infections, said doctors. The report is based on the presence of such particles in the air of the city between 2011 and 2015. This list was prepared solely on the basis of PM10 level, and other pollutants such as PM2.5, NOx, SOx, CO2 etc were not included. If all Indian cities are taken into account the Gwallior reported the highest pollution. (But it is not a megacity.)

While the city’s PM10 level soared to around 140 micrograms per cubic metre, the WHO’s safety limit for this coarse pollutants is not more than 20 micrograms per cubic metre. The Indian safety limit is 60 micrograms per cubic metre. Delhi which has been ranked as the most polluted megacity has PM10 level as high as 240 micrograms per cubic metre. Mumbai which ranks fifth has PM10 level around 120 micrograms per cubic metre. The WHO report also suggests that the PM10 level in Kolkata was just around 100 micrograms per cubic metre in 2009-2010. So what forced the level of dust particles to shoot up?

Chatterjee added that another source of PM10 in Kolkata is the westerly winds that come in from the west and north India during the winter. They bring the dust particles from neighbouring and far flung states including Delhi, UP, Bihar and Jharkhand, raising pollution levels during winter months. Though physicians and scientists claimed that it is the PM2.5 – the finer particulate matter measuring less than 2.5 micros – which are more deadly, they also pointed out PM10 is also bad enough to cause damage and trigger a variety of pulmonary diseases as they can can penetrate deep into the lungs.

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This is modeled air quality for India in forecast mode. The reports for all the 640 Indian districts everyday @ India Air Quality.Info

See what is happening at the regional scale, which is conducted as part of the all India air pollution forecasting program, hosted @ http://www.indiaairquality.info. The animation below is from a WRF-CAMx simulation conducted @ 0.25x0.25 degree resolution (approximately, 25km x 25km).

Event - Air Pollution Data Management (Delhi, November 25-26, 2016)

OpenAQ (openaq.org), in partnership with Care for Air, (careforair.org), an independent clean air awareness and advocacy platform and Urban Emissions (urbanemissions.info), is coming to New Delhi to introduce our open-source global air quality data platform (github.com/openaq) and convene a diverse and passionate group of open air quality data enthusiasts! We'll hold sessions for participants to introduce the platform and what others in our community around the world are already building. But most importantly, most of the workshop will consist of sessions where participants will brainstorm together new ways to use open data to fight 'air inequality' in Delhi, India and the world. The workshop will be collaborative, fun, and impactful.

Who should apply to attend: We're looking for 30 software developers, air pollution + health experts (atmospheric scientists to epidemiologists to medical doctors), journalists, artists, policy-oriented individuals, government air quality folks, students, and open environmental data lovers to join us. Most of all, we're looking for people willing to genuinely connect and work with others outside of their sector to build awesome stuff. That's where we think the magic happens.

Submit your application here

Pollution Could Rise Due to Electric Car Boom in Europe

A boom in electric cars means Europe would have to look at building the equivalent of nearly 50 power stations the size of the UK’s planned Hinkley Point nuclear plant, EU experts have warned. And if big fleets of plug-in cars are charged with electricity from power plants burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, overall levels of SO2 air pollution are likely to rise, a study from the government-funded European Environment Agency shows. Read the full article @ Financial Times

Cars that run on batteries are widely regarded as an unalloyed environmental blessing compared with dirtier, smellier petrol or diesel vehicles and the new research confirms that a big shift to plug-in transport offers many benefits. On average, there would be a noticeable fall in emissions of some types of air pollution, such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, as well as planet-warming carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas produced by human activities.

If the vehicles reach an 80 per cent share by 2050, the EEA study found this would require an extra 150 gigawatts of electricity for charging. The amount of electricity generated by clean renewable power plants has risen significantly across the EU since 1990, according to EU data that show wind, solar and hydropower accounted for 25 per cent of the bloc’s electricity in 2014. Nuclear power plants contributed 27 per cent but nearly 48 per cent still came from coal, natural gas and oil. The EEA study builds on work by the agency showing that if coal power alone were used to charge electric cars, the vehicles’ lifetime carbon emissions would be higher than that of petrol or diesel counterparts. Air pollution experts said the agency’s findings underlined the need for countries to consider carefully how to generate greener electricity as plug-in car numbers grow.

Paris Enjoys Its Second Car Free Day

Paris banned cars from large swaths of the French capital on Sunday as part of Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s wider efforts to fight air pollution. But critics say her policies are only shifting the problem elsewhere. Around half of Paris was off limits to cars during a seven-hour period for the capital’s second “Day without cars” (Journée sans voitures), with exceptions made for public buses, taxis and emergency vehicles. This year’s event was even more ambitious than in 2015, covering 650 km of the city. Some areas around the capital were limited exclusively to pedestrians from 11am this morning, with many free recreational and educational events organised for city residents as part of the much-publicised event.

Read the full article @ France24

Existing Coal, Oil and Gas Fields Will Blow Carbon Budget

The world’s working coal mines and oil and gas fields contain enough carbon to push the world beyond the threshold for catastrophic climate change, according to a report released on Thursday. If all the existing fuel were to be burned, projects currently operating or under construction could be expected to release 942Gt CO2, said the report by US-based thinktank Oil Change International (OCI). This exceeds the carbon limits that would most likely warm the world 1.5C and even over 2C above the pre-industrial average. These were limits agreed at last year’s climate conference in Paris.

It has been established for some time that the enormous unworked reserves claimed by fossil fuel companies contain vastly too much carbon to ever be burned safely. But OCI said that this was the first time an analysis had been done of how much greenhouse gas is stored in projects already working or under construction.

Founder of 350.org and climate campaign Bill McKibben said the report “change[d] our understanding of where we stand. Profoundly”. It means that even if not a single new coal mine, oil or gas field were opened up, the carbon budget would be at risk, said OCI’s executive director Stephen Kretzmann. Projected investment in new extraction sites and infrastructure over the next 20 years adds up to a staggering US$14tn, the report found. “Continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry is now quite clearly and quantifiably climate denial,” said Kretzmann.

Read the full report @ the Guardian

Video - Battling Indoor Air Pollution

Research has shown that indoor air could be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air. Air purifiers provide a simple and effective solution to tackle the problem but with a range of variants available in the market, choosing the right one could become a harrowing task @ Hindustan Times

Fight for Clean Air in Delhi

“Air pollution causes short-term problems like cough, sore throat and eye irritation for most people, but people with chronic respiratory disorders such as asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) may need medical management when pollution levels go up,” said Dr Rajesh Chawla, consulting pulmonologist at Indraprastha Apollo hospital. Read the full article @ Hindustan Times

Video - Change the Air (GAIL, India)

An Indian is dying every 23 seconds due to Air Pollution. Come 2030 and fuels we use today would have made air so toxic with pollutants that it would be well neigh impossible to live and move without oxygen kit as a permanent saddle.

Change the Air Campaign

Infographic - Global Cost of Air Pollution

 

@ World Bank

On-road Emissions in Indian Cities are ~25 times Higher than Conventionally Measured Rates

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) have developed a “real-time exhaust emission prediction model,” stated to be for the first time, that can help manage urban air quality and aid traffic planning in India.

Imagine a mobile app flashing emission levels of your car in real time, helping you to make necessary changes in driving, assisting policy makers in managing grid-wise traffic flow, indicating roads that register the highest pollution levels and warrant traffic decongestion, besides improving the Indian emission standards. IIT-M Ph.D student Rohit Jaykumar, who developed the model, claims that all this can be realised with the artificial neural network (ANN)-based new prediction model.

A sample study was conducted using 10 different diesel passenger cars under different traffic conditions to measure three pollutants, including nitrogen oxide (NOX), carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbons (HC). Sardar Patel Road (3.2 km), which has four lanes, and the two-lane Velachery Main Road (4.4 km) were used for the testing. Separate software was indigenously developed to sync onboard diagnostics (OBD) port in the vehicles and ARAI certified AVL Digas analyzer, which can record emissions at 1 Hz under real-world operating conditions.

“The results were astonishing. The vehicular emissions were 25 times higher than conventional predictions,” Jaykumar said and added that he had now widened the scope of study to test the model for different types of vehicles.

Read the full article @ Times of India

Bad Quality and High Sulfur Diesel in Africa

Swiss firms have been criticised in a report for their links to the African trade in diesel with toxin levels that are illegal in Europe. Campaign group Public Eye says retailers are exploiting weak regulatory standards. Vitol, Trafigura, Addax & Oryx and Lynx Energy have been named because they are shareholders of the fuel retailers. Trafigura and Vitol say the report is misconceived and retailers work within legal limits enforced in the countries. Three of the distribution companies mentioned in the report have responded by saying that they meet the regulatory requirements of the market and have no vested interest in keeping sulphur levels higher than they need to be.

Although this is within the limits set by national governments, the sulphur contained in the fumes from the diesel fuel could increase respiratory illnesses like asthma and bronchitis in affected countries, health experts say. The picture is changing but there are still several African countries which allow diesel to have a sulphur content of more than 2,000 parts per million (ppm), with some allowing more than 5,000ppm, whereas the European standard is less than 10ppm.

Rob de Jong from the UN Environment Programme (Unep) told the BBC that there was a lack of awareness among some policy makers about the significance of the sulphur content. For a long time countries relied on colonial-era standards, which have only been revised in recent years. Another issue is that in the countries where there are refineries, these are unable, for technical reasons, to reduce the sulphur levels to the standard acceptable in Europe. This means that the regulatory standard is kept at the level that the refineries can operate at. Some governments are also worried that cleaner diesel would be more expensive, therefore pushing up the price of transport. But Mr De Jong argued that the difference was minimal and oil price fluctuations were much more significant in determining the diesel price.

Read the full article @ BBC

Infographic - Timeline of Earth's Average Surface Temperature

@ XKCD