By our staff reporter
Evidence suggests that people living in cities with rapid urban growth and high industrial growth in Ethiopia suffer more from air pollution.
The new findings which come courtesy of an event themed, “Together for Cleaner Air: Towards Putting Ethiopia on the Clean Air Map” at the College of Natural and Computational Sciences of the Institute of Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy (IGSSA) of Addis Ababa University (AAU), saw researchers converging to address air pollution issues.
As research showed, cities in the country have air contents of dust, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and ozone often exceeding the national ambient air quality standards.
Christina Isaxon (PhD), a Researcher at Centre for Healthy Indoor Environments and a senior lecturer in Ergonomics and Aerosol Technology, revealed in her introductory address that air pollution affects the climate and the human healthwith big consequences not only in premature deaths and human suffering but also economically lost productivity and strain on the health care system.
“If everybody works together, Ethiopia can be enabled to leapfrog air pollution mistakes that other countries already have done, countries where cities have become denser and more and more polluted,” Christina cited.
According to the Researcher, Ethiopia can plan for cities focused on clean air and green spaces that can accommodate a healthy population and thereby also it plans for cities that are attractive not only to their inhabitants but also attract investors and tourism in general.
Elias Lewi (PhD), Director of IGSSA (AAU), explained that Atmospheric and Oceanic Unit of the Institute is engaged in research activities in the areas of climate change, impact assessment, flood and drought prediction, indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring, computational fluid dynamics and chemical analyses of the earth’s atmosphere.
The Director further said that the Institute and its adjunct members from USA and Ethiopia have been working on installing several Purple Air Quality monitoring instruments and there is a hope that it will be finalized as soon as calibration issues are resolved.
Kassahun Ture (PhD), from AAU, noted that air pollution causes and exacerbates a number of diseases, ranging from asthma to cancer, pulmonary illnesses and heart diseases.
“Outdoor air pollution and particulate matter, one of its major components have been classified as carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer,” he added.
As noted in the conference the main source of air pollution in Ethiopia was open burning of waste, vehicle emissions and traditional practices. Among these, open burning was one of the major sources of air pollution in metropolitan cities such as Addis Ababa.
