#BUandBoston: Unpacking our “Atmosphere of Soup” — Arden Radford
This post is part of our #BUandBoston series, highlighting the work and research of BU students, faculty, and staff throughout the City of Boston and the Greater Boston region. Interested in having your Boston-related work featured? Tag us on Instagram or Twitter (@BUonCities) using the #BUandBoston or send us an email at ioc@bu.edu.
The bustling activity of people’s day-to-day lives is directly mirrored in the air we breathe. Breaking down the composition of which emissions circulate our atmosphere can be complicated, especially in urban areas where a wide range of activities continuously occur in condensed geographic spaces. From car pollution to emissions from tall skyscrapers—the pollutants comprising our atmosphere can be understood as a “blended-up soup,” says BU URBAN Ph.D candidate Arden Radford. “Studying the atmosphere of soup is where things get tricky. As you can imagine, we breathe the air but don’t see the differences.” By studying which and how many “ingredients” go into this atmosphere of soup, Arden aims to understand better how air quality impacts the health of different communities.
While people typically associate greenhouse gases with global warming, they also profoundly impact air quality. Calculating where the air quality emissions come from poses a multifaceted puzzle. In cities, human activity is the dominating source of emissions polluting the atmosphere. According to Arden, this is the first piece of the puzzle, but locating these individual human activities and their impact on the atmosphere is the next piece. “This is where the struggle comes in… We look out a window here on Bay State road, and you’ll see everything from cars driving on the highway, buildings that have boilers in them, buildings with gas heating–there’s a lot of sources that are very very small scale.” With such a vast range of activities all happening at once in one concentrated area, it is difficult to create an exact recipe for air quality emissions.
Carbon dioxide monitors collect information every couple of minutes on when and where emissions are released. Predictions are made on which human activities are responsible for a particular ratio of emissions depending on what is happening in a specific area at a given time and how much carbon dioxide is simultaneously released. At this point of the puzzle, Arden explains that the data runs into a transboundary problem:
“A lot of times when cities think about emissions, they think about what is in their city boundaries. The problem is, the atmosphere doesn’t care for city boundaries, it doesn’t understand that. The monitor shows a footprint, which is, what is our air quality monitor here at Boston University seeing? The radius changes depending on the wind’s speed, the wind’s direction–so that’s the tricky thing, because for the air quality we breathe, it’s not necessarily just what’s in the city of Boston. Sometimes it’s what’s happening in Cambridge, or Malden, or even Worcester–it can go really far depending on wind velocity.”
The next step in the puzzle of air quality emissions is transferring this data to the policy level. Arden imparts that while climate policy at the national scale has struggled at times to capture the variation in needs across states, cities have stepped up as climate leaders. She hopes her research will inform policymakers and encourage collaboration between climate and policy experts. In a historic city like Boston, many residents brace extremely cold winters with heating powered by old oil and gas boilers inside residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. Focusing on legislation that improves efficiency, such as changing how buildings are insulated and increasing geothermal technology, is pertinent to minimizing a city’s biggest sources of air quality emissions. But progress cannot be made without a joint effort. Arden asserts, “The biggest thing for policymakers is uniting and becoming coalitions of cities doing these things, but it’s hard. This is not easy to fix in a day, but keeping the momentum on reducing emissions in urban areas is key.”
Studying the atmosphere is personal for Arden, who grew up in Texas and Hong Kong, both places that struggle immensely with air quality. In reference to growing up in Texas, Arden talks about where her passion for air quality stems from, stating, “Half of my summers were, ‘don’t go outside.’” She then expresses how living in the urban environment of Hong Kong altered her perspective on the critical role of cities in climate policy. “Focusing on air quality helps the most people and urban areas are the largest sources of emissions traditionally. So if we want to work on this problem [climate change], cities are the place to start.”
“We can’t really choose the air we breathe, but specific groups are affected more. Depending on where we are living, we may see bigger impacts from the air quality we have. People who are wealthier, for example, generally have access to better quality air because of where they are living.” As Arden states, working towards improved expertise and policy for air quality is not just environmentally beneficial. It represents a dedication to all those for whom breathing clean air is not always a choice.