ECo Talks: Investigating How Humans Dominate Smoke Air Pollution and How Air Pollution Impacts Disadvantaged Communities with Tess Carter
Tess Carter, senior policy analyst leading the climate, environment, and energy portfolios for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, will present her talk, ” Investigating how humans dominate smoke air pollution and how air pollution impacts disadvantaged communities,” as part of the ECo Talks series produced by the Earth Commons.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Tess Carter is a senior policy analyst leading the climate, environment, and energy portfolios for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at George Washington University, working on several projects, including characterizing the environmental justice impacts of PM2.5 by comparing spatially explicit datasets from different sources. She earned her PhD in atmospheric chemistry from MIT, where she worked on fires and how their smoke impacts air quality and climate, and a BS in chemistry from Brown University. Prior to graduate school, she worked on the National Climate Assessment for several years.
About the Talk:
Increasing fire activity and the associated degradation in air quality in the United States has been indirectly linked to human activity via climate change. In addition, direct attribution of fires to human activities may provide opportunities for near term smoke mitigation by focusing policy, management, and funding efforts on particular ignition sources. We analyze how fires associated with human ignitions (agricultural fires and human-initiated wildfires) impact fire particulate matter under 2.5 microns (PM2.5) concentrations in the contiguous United States (CONUS) from 2003 to 2018. We find that these agricultural and human-initiated wildfires dominate fire PM2.5 in both a high fire and human ignition year (2018) and low fire and human ignition year (2003). Across CONUS, these two human ignition processes account for more than 80% of the population-weighted exposure and premature deaths associated with fire PM2.5.
These findings indicate that a large portion of the smoke exposure and impacts in CONUS are from fires ignited by human activities with large mitigation potential that could be the focus of future management choices and policymaking. I will then also discuss some work on high resolution PM2.5 datasets and how they agree in terms of regional inequitable exposure to air pollution but disagree at the intraurban scale.
Event Details: Light refreshments will be provided. Free and open to all. No RSVP required.
About the Series: ECo Talks feature scholars, leaders and innovators sparking conversation, sharing knowledge, and spurring change. ECo Talks are presented by the Earth Commons Fridays 11:30 am – 12:30 pm in Arrupe Hall Conference Room. Learn more about the series >>
