CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Traffic congestion causes hotspots of air pollution and road traffic accidents

Traffic congestion is a public health issue. It increases air pollution which is a known cause of asthma, lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and in particular creates "hotspots" of low air quality borne by local residents.  It increases the risk of traffic accidents through poor driver behaviour and judgement.

One morning last week, I was stuck in a traffic jam several miles long on the A40 outside Oxford, caused by the super-duper high-flow-thru roundabout at Headington being brought to a halt by roadworks eliminating one lane on one exit and a traffic light failing on another!

Those of you who commute to Oxford will pick up my ironic tone: we have had to endure doubling of commuting times & traffic jams for the past 2 years as Oxford has “improved” each roundabout by turn around the ring road!

Philosophical (I wasn’t going anywhere fast), I found myself wishing the clock turned back to a time when most people lived and worked in the same town, and then I moved on to wishing for a reality where “pass me the floo powder and where is the nearest fireplace?”[Harry Potter], or “beam me up scotty!” [Star Trek]  were actual options. These options would improve my quality of life, my health, and my climate. And of course everyone else’s.

It was also not lost on me, in that traffic jam, that this month [March 2016] my colleague and I had made Air Pollution the theme for our free electronic public health newsletter (to receive this, sign up here Global Health Knowledge Base).

I had just written a blog on air pollution caused by traffic jams in India, China, and why it’s the particulates, released by soot & fuel, that we measure for air quality & health. In the blog, Air pollution, can we reduce the impact of cars on urban air quality? , I had hoped that  emerging economies were going to learn from the mistakes of the UK and other “developed” countries. And there I was in the mistake.

Air pollution, can we reduce the impact of cars on urban air quality?

Air pollution in Delhi

In January 2016, Delhi, India, improved air quality on its streets when it conducted a 2-week air pollution reduction experiment, with private cars allowed on the streets only on alternate days, depending on license plate numbers.   The idea is not new and has been tried elsewhere (Paris and Rome) but I guess its novelty (“who’d have thought” brigade) to the USA explained why it made The New York Times!

Last year, it was all headlines about Bejing [China] and the air quality citizens had to deal with. However it would seem that actually Beijing’s levels of PM10 (particulate matter up to 10 micrometres in size), a measure of air quality, decreased by 40% from 2000 to 2013, whereas Delhi's PM10 levels have increased 47% from 2000 to 2011.

Delhi's PM10 levels are nearly twice as much as in Beijing, and it has the worst PM 2.5 levels of 1600 cities in the world. Thus the need for the license plate experiment. In a BBC article, you can read more about the reasons “Why Delhi is losing its clean air war” and discover the varied & innovative measures China has taken to ameliorate motor car use.

No doubt spurred on by Delhi’s experiment, a health journalist in Bangladesh alerted the HIFA forum to the equally bad situation in India’s neighbour, Bangladesh.

Climate change to cause more diet related deaths

A young man in drought conditions in Ethiopia (Author: USAID African Bureau)

We are all told to improve our diet; increasing our fruit and vegetable consumption and reducing our red meat intake. But a new study, ‘Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change; a modelling study,’ published in The Lancet has revealed that climate change may make eating our 5 a day more challenging, and that subsequent dietary shifts and changes in body weight will lead to more than half a million additional deaths worldwide by 2050.

Author of the Month Blog: Mason's World Encyclopedia of Livestock Breeds and Breeding, Valerie Porter

A tall, spare, bearded, lively, modest, quietly humorous and gentle man, the animal breeding consultant Ian L Mason was known and respected worldwide for his encyclopaedic and authoritative knowledge of livestock breeds and breeding. It was said of him by a friend in Israel: ‘It is known in Asia that Dr Mason has a beard, wears a beret and rides a bicycle.’ His wife Elizabeth – they were married for nearly 70 years – first met him at Cambridge University in the 1930s when she became aware of a tall (6ft 2), gauche and unpredictable young man with a shock of wavy fair hair and very long legs, who ‘rushed about a lot’.

Long before the creation of various rare-breed organisations in different parts of the world, Ian’s vision had been to conserve indigenous livestock breeds, even then being threatened by the rapid expansion of major commercial breeds. His aim was firstly to identify and catalogue each breed, preferably by seeing them in the field in their own country, and then to promote their protection by educating breeders, institutes, academics and practical farmers about their special qualities. As he wrote in 1974, ‘any extinction or disappearance of a species or breed represents an irreplaceable element of the life diversity that is lost’.

Sustainable future depends on women

Today, on International Women’s Day, we celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, while calling action for gender parity. The United Nations campaigns for “Planet 50-50 by 2030” referring to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are to be achieved in the next 15 years. The goals urge us to, for example, achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls (SDG 5), and to eliminate gender disparities in education (SDG 4). Below, I focus on these goals in more detail and discuss why they are so important for sustainable development, but let’s first look at how gender equality is measured and distributed in the world today.