For long, pollution from rural households due to burning of firewood, coal and dung was considered chronically harmful to people, affecting their lungs. Few realised that all the biofuel cooking and biomass burning would contribute to atmospheric brown clouds (ABC), India’s latest environment concern.
Climate, energy and health scientists from around the world will be joining hands on Monday, December 1, to launch Project Surya which hopes to reduce air pollution caused by soot due to cooking with renewable sources that adds to the brown cloud phenomenon.
ABCs are plumes of air pollution that consist of copious amounts of tiny particles of soot, sulphates, nitrates, fly ash and many other pollutants. ABC-induced atmospheric solar heating and surface dimming are large over Asia in general and over India and China, in particular, according to studies conducted by the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) last month.
Scientists of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sri Ramachandra University (SRMC), California Institute for Telecommunications and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) will be working on a group of villages spread over about 100 km in Uttar Pradesh in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, one of the ABC regional hotspots in the world, and some hamlets in Tamil Nadu, with lower levels of emissions.
“Surya is Sun or Solar in Sanskrit. So we have named the project Surya,” said Prof Kalpana Balakrishnan, HoD, Department of Environmental Health Engineering, SRMC. While she and her colleagues will be documenting the health impact on women and children due to cooking with renewable sources, energy scientists will be finding ways to improve the efficiency of renewable sources. Satellites will be tracking elemental carbon in the soot within the radius.
No comments:
Post a Comment