Improving present day and future estimates of anthropogenic sectoral emissions and the resulting air quality impacts in Africa.

The African continent is undergoing immense social and economic change, particularly regarding population growth and urbanization, where the urban population in Africa is anticipated to increase by a factor of 3 over the next 40 years. To understand the potential health impacts from this demographical shift and design efficient emission mitigation strategies, we used improved Africa-specific emissions that account for inefficient combustion sources for a number of sectors such as transportation, household energy generation, waste burning, and home heating and cooking. When these underrepresented emissions sources are combined with the current estimates of emissions in Africa, ambient particulate matter concentrations from present-day anthropogenic activity contribute to 13 210 annual premature deaths, with the largest contributions (38%) coming from residential emissions.

Transient climate and ambient health impacts due to national solid fuel cookstove emissions.

Residential solid fuel use contributes to degraded indoor and ambient air quality and may affect global surface temperature. However, the potential for national-scale cookstove intervention programs to mitigate the latter issues is not yet well known, owing to the spatial heterogeneity of aerosol emissions and impacts, along with coemitted species. Here we use a combination of atmospheric modeling, remote sensing, and adjoint sensitivity analysis to individually evaluate consequences of a 20-y linear phase-out of cookstove emissions in each country with greater than 5% of the population using solid fuel for cooking.

Response of global particulate-matter-related mortality to changes in local precursor emissions.

Recent Global Burden of Disease (GBD) assessments estimated that outdoor fine-particulate matter (PM2.5) is a causal factor in over 5% of global premature deaths. PM2.

The expanding scope of air pollution monitoring can facilitate sustainable development.

This paper explores technologies currently expanding the physical scope of air pollution monitoring and their potential contributions to the assessment of sustainable development. This potential lies largely in the ability of these technologies to address issues typically on the fringe of the air pollution agenda. Air pollution monitoring tends to be primarily focused on human health, and largely neglects other aspects of sustainable development.