Air Quality

This spring, Zully Jaurez took a deeper dive into how frontline communities in Los Angeles, a city built on the world’s largest urban oil field, mobilized and ultimately won a ban on new oil drilling and begin phasing out existing wells in their city.

“We think Africans in rural areas should have the same quality of power as Africans in urban areas, and that should be the same quality power as everywhere else in the world,” Orosz says.

“When you look at roadway density and proximity to roadways, there’s the highest density in non-white and low-income communities, which leads to disproportionate exposures and consequently disparate health impacts."

For decades, Black people in this country have felt the heavy toll of environmental racism. A study published by University of Michigan in 2016 shows that communities of color and low-income neighborhoods are targeted by polluting industries. The Takeaway spoke with Switzer Fellow Christina Fuller on the issue.

“This really has to do with discriminatory planning processes in which communities of color and low-income communities are often located near ports, major roadways and distribution centers, and so therefore are disproportionately exposed to diesel exhaust,” Regan says.

Scientists are working to understand "the chaotic cascade of dynamics that causes a dust storm to initiate a particular point in space and a particular point in time," says Thomas Gill.

Globally, we generate $120 billion of agricultural waste every year. What farmers cannot sell, they often burn, with catastrophic consequences for human health and the environment. Takachar has developed a cheap, small-scale, portable technology that attaches to tractors in remote farms. The award-winning machine converts crop residues into sellable bio-products like fuel and fertilizer, and reduces smoke emissions by up to 98%.