The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in the last and current centuries. In 1800, only 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. It increased to 14 and 47% in 1900 and 2000, respectively. Since 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world population lives in the urban areas (Laski and Schellekens, 2007). In year 2003, United Nations estimated that by ...

An important aspect of the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) is a greater emphasis on reducing the health impacts from ambient air pollution in developing countries. Meanwhile, the burden of human disease attributable to ambient air pollution in sub-Saharan Africa is growing, yet estimates of its impact on the region are possibly underestimated due to a lack of air quality monitoring, a ...

Monitoring and managing urban air pollution is a significant challenge for the sustainability of our environment. We quickly survey the air pollution modeling problem, introduce a new dataset of mobile air quality measurements in Zurich, and discuss the challenges of making sense of these data.

Urban and peri-urban growth is increasing world-wide and Europe is now one of the most urbanized continents in the world. Oslo is one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. This creates pressure on its infrastructure, including traffic and environmental urban quality. Additionally, vehicular traffic is a major contributor to CO2 emissions, which impacts climate change. It is recognized that a...

BACKGROUND Air pollution from biomass fuels in Africa is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity both in adults and children. The work describes the nature and quantity of smoke exposure from biomass fuel in Malawian homes. METHODS Markers of indoor air quality were measured in 62 homes (31 rural and 31 urban) over a typical 24 h period. Four different devices were used (one gravimetri...

A scheme that couples a detailed building energy model, EnergyPlus, and an urban canopy model, the Town Energy Balance (TEB), is presented. Both models are well accepted and evaluated within their individual scientific communities. The coupled scheme proposes a more realistic representation of buildings and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, which allows a broader analysi...

In most large cities of the developing world, urban air pollution has worsened, which has been detrimental to the health of their populations. At the same time, it is difficult for lay people to sense the level of air quality with bare human perception as air pollutants are mostly invisible and odorless. We believe that computing technologies can help increase awareness of urban air quality. To...

Distributed power generation-electricity generation that is produced by many small stationary power generators distributed throughout an urban air basin-has the potential to supply a significant portion of electricity in future years. As a result, distributed generation may lead to increased pollutant emissions within an urban air basin, which could adversely affect air quality. However, the us...