Publications by authors named "Veronica Southerland"
Article Synopsis
- New environmental justice laws in the U.S. aim to tackle unfair air pollution levels that affect people in different areas, especially where health issues are worsened by bad air quality.
- The goal is to find better ways to measure and track these pollution problems to ensure they are being solved effectively.
- Recent federal funding offers a great chance for scientists and government officials to work together to improve air quality and reduce health risks from pollution for everyone.
Ambient fine particulate matter (PM) is the world's leading environmental health risk factor. Quantification is needed of regional contributions to changes in global PM exposure. Here we interpret satellite-derived PM estimates over 1998-2019 and find a reversal of previous growth in global PM air pollution, which is quantitatively attributed to contributions from 13 regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With much of the world's population residing in urban areas, an understanding of air pollution exposures at the city level can inform mitigation approaches. Previous studies of global urban air pollution have not considered trends in air pollutant concentrations nor corresponding attributable mortality burdens. We aimed to estimate trends in fine particulate matter (PM) concentrations and associated mortality for cities globally.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAir pollution levels are uneven within cities, contributing to persistent health disparities between neighborhoods and population sub-groups. Highly spatially resolved information on pollution levels and disease rates is necessary to characterize inequities in air pollution exposure and related health risks. We leverage recent advances in deriving surface pollution levels from satellite remote sensing and granular data in disease rates for one city, Washington, DC, to assess intra-urban heterogeneity in fine particulate matter (PM)- attributable mortality and morbidity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Air pollution-attributable disease burdens reported at global, country, state, or county levels mask potential smaller-scale geographic heterogeneity driven by variation in pollution levels and disease rates. Capturing within-city variation in air pollution health impacts is now possible with high-resolution pollutant concentrations.
Objectives: We quantified neighborhood-level variation in air pollution health risks, comparing results from highly spatially resolved pollutant and disease rate data sets available for the Bay Area, California.