Cities pay a climate penalty as air pollution worsens

For decades, the U.S. has inched toward a future with cleaner air. Federal legislation like the Air Quality Act of 1967 and the Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970 significantly improved air quality over the last 50 years, but now experts warn that climate change could be unraveling the country’s progress. 

With climate-driven wildfires, drought and extreme heat becoming more common, air quality will continue to worsen, according to a recent report from the climate research nonprofit First Street Foundation, or FSF. 

“It’s interesting that at a national level, we’re starting to see this inflection point, or what the literature oftentimes refers to as the climate penalty,” said Jeremy Porter, head of FSF’s climate implications research, during the foundation’s Feb. 14 webinar. “This climate penalty really indicates that we’ve improved air quality from regulatory policies, but climate is now starting to reverse some of those gains.” 

The report found that western communities like Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco are most vulnerable to increased air quality risks because they’re in fire-prone areas, but the effects of wildfire smoke, which is a large contributor to air quality, are dispersed throughout the country. Emissions from transportation and industry as well as a regions’ topography and weather patterns can also impact the local air quality. A prime example would be last year’s wildfires in Canada that shrouded major cities like New York City and Chicago in smoky, hazy air, researchers wrote. 

That means breathing could get a lot harder over the next three decades, researchers warned. 

As the climate becomes hotter and dryer, especially with smoke from wildfires, that leaves communities at-risk of more polluting particulate matter or ground-level ozone circulating through the air. Breathing in harmful particulate matter leaves vulnerable individuals susceptible to health risks like asthma, chronic bronchitis and other respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, the report stated. 

Currently, FSF estimates that more than 14 million U.S. properties experience at least seven days of poor air quality just from particulate matter, with 5.7 million of those properties dealing with at least 10 days of unhealthy air annually due to smoke. Within the next 30 years, an additional 1.7 million properties could see at least 14 days of poor air quality days a year. 

The promise of deteriorating air conditions “may lead many Americans to consider moving away from areas with poor air quality or avoid moving to those areas altogether,” researchers wrote. Beyond the health risks to residents, this climate-related penalty “could result in reduced tax bases for affected areas, decreasing their capacity to invest in infrastructure, adapt to the changing environment and provide community services.”  

That’s why FSF recently updated their Risk Factor data tool that details fire, flood, wind and heat risks to individual properties. The application was designed to help inform state and local governments’ regulatory policies and programs aimed at improving the air quality in their communities. 

The new air quality profile provides information such as the projected number of days with poor air quality in the current year, in 15 years and in 30 years. It also describes and maps nearby facilities that contribute to air pollution and details what chemicals they emit based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency, said Matthew Eby, CEO and founder of FSF. 

The data could also help agencies stay in compliance with federal environmental standards, such as the EPA’s new air particulate matter rule, which reduced the acceptable level of particulate matter from 12 micrograms of matter per cubic meter of air to 9 micrograms. 

Ultimately, FSF’s air data tool could help state and local governments better align policies and programs to meet ever-changing environmental conditions and standards, said Ed Kearns, the foundation's chief data officer. 

The data may suggest a need to deploy air quality monitors or air filters in a community, for instance, to more closely track and manage air quality conditions, Eby said. 

Houston, Texas, for example, is using $500,000 from an EPA grant to deploy nine air quality sensors and a mobile monitoring unit for tracking air quality conditions over the next three years, which will help government officials implement pollution mitigation efforts. In October, the Washington state Department of Ecology started deploying 50 air-quality monitors throughout the state to track the prevalence of air pollutants. Officials said data from the monitors will support the establishment and enforcement of pollution regulations and air quality standards. 

Such efforts could help more communities comply with the EPA’s standard for clean air, which officials estimate could prevent “up to 4,200 premature deaths per year and 270,000 lost work days per year, resulting in as much as $43 billion in net health benefits annually,” researchers wrote.