Dieselgate, air quality on Mars, solving the school run and making a documentary on air pollution in Pittsburgh. Read about all this and more in the latest Air Quality News Magazine.
The 29th edition of Air Quality News magazine has been published and is now available to read online.
Welcome to the 29th issue of Air Quality News, which just happens to have been published on June 19th, Clean Air Day 2025.
We always try to bring our readers a broad range of stories concerning our need to breathe clean air and in that respect, I’m delighted with the line-up we are presenting in this issue.
Of course, with Simon Guerrier on board we are guaranteed at least one story each issue that arrives from left field. This one however arrives from space. Simon looks at the systems designed to keep the earliest astronauts alive and takes the story to its logical conclusion: what air quality can we expect on Mars?
Back to earth with a bang and long-time contributors ClientEarth look at the dieselgate scandal which came to light 10 years ago. Emily Kearsey tells a shocking tale of cars fitted with defeat devices are still on the UK’s roads and still causing huge numbers of premature deaths.
I travel the short distance from the AQN offices to one of the UK’s three urban background supersites in South Manchester for an extremely instructive look around.
In an article written specifically for Clean Air Day, Kate Metcalf, Co-Director of the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) talks about how she has been inspired by Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. She writes: ‘This Clean Air Day, I hope we can all reflect on the people who have inspired us. And then act.”
We invited Dr Jim McQuaid, from the University of Leeds, to speak at our Northern Air Quality Conference in March but it clashed with the Royal Society’s Pairing Scheme, in which academics spend time with a relevant figure from government. Emily Whitehouse talks to Jim about how he got on.
Speaking of conferences, Nicola Pastore, co-founder of Solve the School Run will be speaking at our November conference in London. Emily talks to her about how the campaign took shape and how her background in data analytics strengthens their work.
In our International feature we turn to Pittsburgh where environmental film-maker Mark Dixon has taken on the role of air quality champion, documenting the city’s struggles in a work-in-progress film titled ‘Inversion’.
Martin Guttridge-Hewitt throws light on a strange paradox in which our efforts to improve air quality are beset with unintended consequences: namely, adding to global warming. Specifically, it is the reduction in sulphur emissions which leads to more solar radiation reaching the earth, which leads to more surface warming.
In what might be considered a sequel to Simon Guerrier’s article in the last issue, here he discusses the health benefits of interfacing with flora, and we round up the magazine by looking at the energy benefits of new solar technologies, specifically: flexible solar cells.
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