Join us on May 5th, 2021 from 12-1:30PM (EDT) for this exciting and enlightening webinar with speaker Dr Gary Fuller, all the way from London, England.
Air pollution dogged humanity since we first sat round a camp fire. Accounts from Medieval London describe the polluted air at the time and the artist Monet came to the city to paint its polluted air and skies around 1900. It is therefore astonishing that the health impacts were not recognised until the disaster of the 1952 smog. Although the air in the UK is cleaner today, globally, many millions are living in very polluted conditions. Despite the recognition of air pollution health impacts, many people in London and the UK live in areas that still fail legal limits. Today, the city is rising to the challenges of combating modern air pollution with schemes such as the Ultra-Low Emission Zone and investments in cleaner buses. Looking to the future, the growing evidence of life-course impacts and a lack of a zero effects threshold should prompt us to change the way that we manage air pollution.
Dr Gary Fuller is an air pollution scientist at Imperial College London. He led the development of the London Air Quality Network to become Europe’s most advanced regional measurement network. His research interests focus on the urban air pollution sources; how these are changing and how they affect our health. Gary is keen to ensure that air pollution is better understood by the public and policy makers. He is a member of the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group and was recently appointed as one of the UKRI / Met Office Clean Air Champions. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian newspaper. His air pollution book, “The Invisible Killer” is published by Melville House in Europe and North America.
The Sierra Club Canada Foundation has a project underway to measure and report on the outdoor air quality (AQ) in Ottawa. While the official, government-operated AQ station in Ottawa reports levels generally in the "Low Risk" category, our preliminary air tracking results are finding areas, or air pollution 'hotspots', where the AQ can be quite dangerous. We are very extcied to host Dr Gary Fuller for this webinar, as there is a lot that can be learned from his work in London.
