New Zealand's Poor Air Quality

Most images of New Zealand show a pristine environment of great beauty. It therefore comes as a surprise that airborne particle pollution in many towns is above World Health Organisation guidelines. This is not due to the diesel cars that confound efforts to manage air pollution in Europe, or the density of cities and industry that contributes to problems in east Asia, Europe and parts of north America. It is due mainly to home heating.

With limited availability of natural gas and expensive electricity many New Zealanders, especially those in the South Island, rely on wood burning to heat their homes. National standards for particle pollution allow for one polluted day per year but Christchurch measured eight in 2015 and the city of Timaru breached standards on 26 days.

New Zealand’s poorly insulated homes and fuel poverty contribute to high winter deaths and children’s asthma. No heating is not an option. Better wood stoves or heat pumps are alternatives, along with insulation, but upgrading homes takes time and even with modern stoves the smoke produced depends on the user . Teaching people to burn wood better could help air pollution right away. The Warmer Cheaper programme takes you step by step through lighting a fire and keeping it going for the evening with the least pollution. One of the main causes of smoke is insufficient kindling. Schools and community groups are therefore being harnessed to sell kindling and an award-winning invention, the Kindling Cracker, by Kiwi teenager Ayla Hutchinson can help people chop kindling easily and safely.

Read the full article @ the Guardian

Northern India Contributes to Shrinking of Glaciers

@ Third Pole - The region covering the mighty Himalaya-Hindukush mountains and the Tibetan plateau happens to be the third largest ice-covered region on the planet falling behind the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. The Asian region, covered in ice and house to several glaciers, is thus nicknamed as the Third Pole. And like the other snow-covered regions on the planet, the glaciers in this region are not being spared by climate change and global warming. They are shrinking.

Read the full article @ Indian Express


Quoting a Chinese study, The Washington Post recently reported that almost 18 per cent of China’s glaciers have melted over the last five decades. NewAtlas.com reports that Western China itself serves as a home to 48,571 glaciers covering an area of 51,840 sq km. Thus the results are alarming as the Third Pole is located near densely populated countries like India and China, unlike the Arctic and the Antarctic regions. While the shrinking of glaciers will affect the water supply and industrialisation in these areas, billions of people sprawled in these countries are bound to be adversely affected subsequently. The Indus River, for instance, is fed by the melting water from the Chinese glaciers.

Apart from global warming, another factor that aggravates the melting of glaciers in the Third Pole is air pollution. China and India are among the worst-ranked countries in air pollution. A Greenpeace report states that coal burning is the biggest contributor of air pollution in China and surrounding areas and if China wants to work on its problem of air pollution, it has to reduce its coal consumption. However, in a new study published in journal Nature Communications, researchers found out how black carbon acts as a catalyst in the melting of glaciers in the Third Pole region.



Using “chemical fingerprinting”, researchers analysed what kind of burning produces the black carbon particles found all across the Third Pole. The results were astounding. Burning of fossil fuels along with biomass like animal dung and plant matter contribute gravely to the creation of black carbon particles. While most of the Tibetan Plateau was being directly affected by the fossil fuel burning in China, the black carbon found in the Himalayan region was mostly coming from northern India.

Researchers also noted that the sampled black carbon in the central part of the Tibetan plateau was coming from from biomass burning rather than fossil fuels. This could point towards the Tibetan practices like burning yak dung for cooking and heating. Researcher Shichang Kang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research said it was “very surprising” that these processes were contributing more towards the melting of glaciers in certain parts of the region, The Washington Post reports.

The study could help controlling the situation since earmarks the areas that need to be worked upon. For instance, in the Tibetan region, the government could help the locals find alternatives to burning biomass. Similarly, industries in the vicinity could also formulate plans to reduce the black carbon production.

Air Pollution in Pimpri Chinchwad Increased 35% in the Last Six Years

Air pollution in the city is monitored at six places. The percentage of pollutants has increased due to emissions from public as well as private vehicles, the report states. Like most years in the past, Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) has submitted the environment status report much after the July 31 deadline even as it has expressed an ambition to prepare a time-bound programme for environment-friendly development. The report considers poor rainfall last year and variations in the weather, besides rising vehicular population as main reasons for increased air pollution in the city. On the air pollution in the city, the report also blames the poor rainfall last year and the variations in temperatures, besides public and individual vehicles.

Read the full report @ Times of India

Haze in Singapore Due to Forest Fires in Indonesia

The haze that affected Singapore from Friday to Sunday was caused by forest fires burning in Rokan Hilir in Sumatra's Riau province, Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) said yesterday. Dr Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, who heads the BNPB's data and information division, said the smoke was carried to Singapore by winds unleashed by Typhoon Lionrock in the Philippines.

Read this for haze situation update

The tropical cyclone has since left the Philippines and was moving towards Japan yesterday. Satellites detected 162 "fire alerts" in the Rokan Hilir regency between Friday and Sunday. The fire alerts accounted for almost half of all the 338 fires detected across Sumatra and Kalimantan over the same three days. The fires were exacerbated by a combination of dry conditions, sporadic rains and the illegal use of fire for land clearing.

While the hazy conditions in Singapore cleared up by yesterday, heavy haze hit most parts of Kuala Lumpur, with air pollutant readings in the Malaysian capital reaching near "unhealthy" levels, Xinhua news agency reported. The 88-storey Petronas Towers were barely visible in the thick haze, which reached even the office of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, prompting him to tweet: "The haze is back in some areas, so please take healthcare measures, especially the old and the young."

Read the full article @ Strait Times

Air Pollution to Printing Ink

A chorus of car horns, jammed roads and ever rising fuel prices - These problems have become a daily routine for most urban commuters in India. And along with road congestion, city dwellers also have to deal with clouds of smoke from various emissions making our air toxic and difficult to breathe in. To address these problems, India's start-up space is stepping up to the challenge, trying to fix traffic, parking problems and air pollution through creative technology. Some of them are even using pollution to print t-shirts and paint walls, on this episode of Heads Up, meet these innovators and hear their stories.

Read the full story @ NDTV

INR 700 crore (~USD 105 million) Collected in Delhi as Truck Entry Fees and Diesel Cess - No News on Spending

At least Rs 400 crore collected under the "polluter pays" principle in recent times and Rs 300 crore out of the entire pollution cess on diesel sold in the capital since 2008 are yet to be utilised to improve the air quality in the capital.

Though the state government, the pollution control committees and the municipal corporations are flush with such funds following Supreme Court and National Green Tribunal (NGT) directives strictly penalising polluting sources, they are yet to frame concrete plans on how to spend the money .

Experts told TOI that the money shouldn't be spent on day-to-day operations or infrastructure of these departments or agencies but pumped into where it was needed most: improving public transport and implementing tried and tested methods to clean up the air of one of the worst polluted cities in the world. The environment compensation charge (ECC) levied by the apex court on trucks entering Delhi has led to the corporations collecting Rs 395 crores, which has been handed over to the state transport department. Likewise, the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), also under the AAP government, has collected more than Rs 2.5 crore as ECC for waste burning and construction projects violating dust pollution norms.

However, the authorities seem to be dragging their feet on how to implement what NGT and the court had ordered: that such funds should be spent to fight Delhi's air pollution. DPCC is also the custodian of the "air ambience fund" which was created in 2008 to collect a pollution cess of 25 paise on every litre of diesel sold in the capital. The state government has been utlising this fund to subsidise electric vehicles; a part of it has also been used on the odd even scheme. However, about Rs 300 crore of the corpus remains unutilised.

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has recently opened an account for the collection of 1% pollution cess on the ex-showroom price of luxury diesel vehicles (more than 2000 cc). It is developing a strategy now to invest this amount which will be submitted to the apex court soon. "The money will be utilized for pollution monitoring, control and public awareness. In the last one week since we opened the bank account for this cess, we have collected Rs 3 lakh from various NCR areas. However, Delhi hasn't started levying this yet," a CPCB official said.

Read the full report @ Times of India

Nottingham Drops 33% of CO2 footprint

The local authority set the area a target of a 26% reduction by 2020, but the latest figures mean that the target has been beaten this year. According to the city council – Nottingham is now producing three tonnes less of CO2 per year per person than they were in 2005.

In 2012 Nottingham introduced a workplace parking levy, which saw businesses with 11 or more employees parking on their premises paying the £381 charge. The city council claims the levy, which has 100% compliance rate, has enabled it to invest in better public transport to tackle air pollution and traffic congestion in Nottingham.
Investment

In 2014 the local authority expanded its electric bus fleet to 50 partly thanks to the government’s green bus fund. “A significant part of this reduction – around 13% – is due to the popularity of public transport, cycling and walking in Nottingham. “Certainly, the workplace parking levy is a unique policy in the UK at the moment. But we believe it has the potential to help many cities deal with congestion and air quality issues. It enables us to invest in low-carbon transport, and the fact it provides regulation, and to some extent, constraint on city centre usage are significant things.”
Introduction

Read the full article @ Air Quality News

Urban Heat Island Effect in Chinese Cities

Here’s another way China’s notorious air pollution is making citizens’ lives uncomfortable—it’s making the country’s cities hotter. Researchers have found evidence that the pollution engulfing China’s cities enhances the warming effect of cityscapes, raising the temperature by one degree Celsius. Writing in Nature Communications, they say it’s not the bigger cities that suffer the most, but those with the worst of a certain type of air pollution.

Cities tend to be hotter than countryside areas because of the Urban Heat Island effect—the density of buildings and the materials they are built out of absorb heat and radiation from the sun extremely well, but don’t readily release it at night, keeping the area warmer for longer.

Meanwhile, China’s cities are often covered in a haze, as the researchers call it, that comes from the vehicles, factories, and coal-fired power plants that have driven China’s industrial development, which in turns has triggered a mass migration of citizens from rural areas into cities in search of work. The population regularly manifests as a suffocating smog that can engulf major cities for days.

Scientists have long suspected pollution exacerbates the Urban Heat Island, said Xuhui Lee, a professor at the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, in a press release. The new finding, based on satellite data, is the first direct evidence that China’s infamous pollution problems are compounding the effect.

But not all pollution is created equal. Fine pollution particles, such as those in the 2.5 PM (particulate matter) range that are normally blamed for damaging health can actually be a protector when it comes to city heat. On the one hand, they cause asthma and penetrate the blood stream and internal organs, raising the risk of cancer and heart disease. On the other hand, those same sized particles actually block sunlight, which can help cool city surfaces.

Larger aerosol particles, such as those generated from road dust, coal burning, cooking stoves and sand—particularly a problem in cities in China’s northwest that are near to the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts—absorb and radiate heat while also being bad for health. The dust carried over from the deserts, combined with industrial pollution, mean these cities suffer the most from a thicker haze and a larger heating effect, compared to the bigger coastal cities. Hami City, population 450,000, has an Urban Heat Island effect three times worse than Shanghai, which has 14 million residents.

Read the full article @ Quartz

Mumbai Dumpyard Fires Made for Toxic Air

Chembur, Ghatkopar and Mankhurd residents breathe the city’s worst air, with frequent fires at the Deonar and Mulund dumping grounds pushing air pollution to dangerously high levels. The BMC’s data only reinforces what citizens and activists have been pointing out for months. Residents have been complaining about the quality of air after repeated fires between December 2015 and March 2016 at Deonar, the city’s largest dumpyard. Air quality has been ‘very poor’, affecting visibility and causing breathing problems and asthma attacks among the locals. 

Month-wise data from April 2015 to March 2016 showed SPM level in Chembur was 700 microgram per cubic meter (mgcm) – the ideal limit being 200 – between December and March. At Bhandup, SPM levels touched 1,000 mgcm in December last year.



Experts said industrial units in Chembur and Bhandup, and a rise in vehicular traffic, intense construction activities and stone crushing could be causing poor air quality. “SPM is bound to be very high in Mumbai because of a combination of a number of particles strung together. The main source for the pollutant is dust from open landfills, open burning and several construction activities in the city,” said Gufran Beig, project director, System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR). “Last year, the soil was also dry because of poor rainfall and sea breeze allowed dust to be suspended closer to the earth’s surface,” Beig said.

Read full article @ Hindustan Times

Infographic - Waste Overflowing on Roads and from Dustbins in Delhi

@ Times of India

Cloth Masks Provide Very Little Protection Against Air Pollution

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have suggested that in order to reduce exposure to air pollution wearing inexpensive cloth masks could be of only a little help and give you a false sense of security, especially in highly polluted areas. Washable cloth masks are widely used in India and other Asian for personal protection against airborne particulate matter.

"Wearing cloth masks reduced the exposure to some extent," but "the most commonly used cloth mask products perform poorly when compared to alternative options available on the market," said the study by scientists at University of Massachusetts Amherst. In a series of experiments with an experimental mannequin in Nepal, the researchers tested four masks -- one pleated surgical type, two cloth and one cone-shaped cloth with exhalation flaps. They tested for several variables and effectiveness in filtering out five different synthetic aerosol particle sizes plus three particle sizes of diluted whole diesel exhaust, which simulated real-world conditions.



Among the cloth masks, the one with exhaust valves performed fairly well, removing 80-90 percent of synthetic particles and about 57 per cent of diesel exhaust. Plain cloth masks were "only marginally beneficial" they said, in protecting people from particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, often considered more harmful than larger particles because they can penetrate the lungs more deeply.

"Unfortunately, the least effective two mask types are also inexpensive, reusable and are widely used in developing countries, implying they are a popular consumer choice where pollution mitigation is warranted," the authors noted.

Read the full article @ India TV

Infographic - Honking Problem - Number of Noise Monitors in Delhi = 15

@ Times of India

China’s Thermal Coal Imports Jumped 9% Year-on-Year in 2016

According to the latest issue of the China Resources Quarterly (CRQ) from Australia’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. The country took 44 million t over the three months to June 2016 with the majority of that coming from Indonesia. The southeast Asian country accounted for 51% of Chinese imports. In contrast, Australia saw its shipments to China fall 10% year-on-year to 9 million t, while the value of Australian exports fell 18% year-on-year to AUS$509.8 million.

Australian thermal coal exports to China peaked recently at 12.9 million t in 2Q14 but have now recorded four consecutive quarters under 10 million t – with a low of 6.6 million t in the first quarter of this year. The value of exports has fallen from AUS$870.7 million in 2Q14.

The increase in thermal coal exports comes as the Chinese government continues to cut back on excess domestic production. The government aims to eliminate 500 million t of production over the next three to five years. Over the first half of the year, Chinese thermal coal imports registered a fall of just 3.4% year-on-year, a significant increase on the 34.8% decline seen in 1H15. That said, BMI Research believe the effects of government stimulus in driving coal demand, coupled with an easing of production cuts in 2017, will see thermal coal imports “subsiding gradually in the coming years.”

“Weak consumption growth means that China’s thermal coal imports will remain capped around the 108 million t registered in 2015,” BMI Research concluded. “China’s imports peaked at 192 million t in 2013 and we expect 2017 to see a resumption of the gradual contraction in imports.”

Read the full article @ World Coal