Goal
Clean energy policies reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and harmful air pollutants, which improves air quality and public health. Air pollution, climate change, and energy burdens are unequally borne by communities of color, especially Black Americans. Our goal is to investigate how energy transitions can alleviate the compounding burden of these intersecting disparities.
Objectives
We extend the analysis of air quality models to investigate the environmental justice dimensions of air pollution. We use U.S. EPA available tools to quantify air quality and public health benefits and pair results with U.S. Census Bureau data to ascertain who is affected by these air pollution changes.
Publications, Reports, Etc.
Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism, Nelson Institue Brief, 2021
U.S. decarbonization impacts on air quality and environmental justice, Gallagher and Holloway, 2022Satellite Data for Environmental Justice, NASA
Madison Receives EPA Funding to Improve Air Quality Monitoring and Tackle Health Disparities
Madison to use low-cost sensors to measure neighborhood air qualityAn Observation-Driven Framework for Air Pollution Equity and Justice Intervention Modeling
Funding Partners:
NASA - through the HAQAST Tiger Teams on Environmental Justice and through an EEJ grant led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – and the McKnight Foundation
Timeline:
2020 – Present
Tools:
U.S. EPA’s CO-Benefits Risk Assessment Health Impacts Screening and Mapping Tool (COBRA), Intervention Model of Air Pollution (InMAP), Satellite-Enable InMAP (SenMAP), and related data sets for emissions, air quality, and population.
Core Team Members:
Tracey Holloway, Lizzy Kysela, Roy Wang, and Ciaran Gallagher (Ph.D. 2023)
Prior Funding
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at UW–Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) as well as the George Bunn Fellowship in Energy Analysis and Policy.