Overview

Decades of air quality and public health research has demonstrated the negative health effects of short- and long-term exposure to air pollutants. Respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, cancers, cognitive impairments, and birth defects are associated with poor air quality. In 1970, enactment of the Clean Air Act expanded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to set air quality standards and enforce them through new regulatory programs. Over the subsequent decades, new regulations reduced air pollution and its harmful health effects, contributing to a measurable improvement in life expectancy in the United States.

Monitoring air pollution allows the government to enforce air quality standards as well as collect data to inform subsequent research and policies to improve society. While there are many ways the EPA and state, local, and tribal governments collect data to understand air quality and take action to reduce harmful pollutants, there remains an opportunity to collect data on a more granular level. Building an evidence base to better understand how individual communities and neighborhoods experience variations in air quality can have an impact on disparities in health outcomes across the country. This use case describes one such example where local scientists partnered with a community to collect hyperlocal, realtime data to fill a gap in the evidence and inform future decisions.

Authors