AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Air Quality Management in Chile: Effectiveness and Environmental Justice Issues
HECTOR JORQUERA, Yasna Llanos, Ana Villalobos, Javier Ustariz, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Abstract Number: 320 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract 70% of Chile's population live in urban areas where ambient PM2.5 exceeds the annual ambient standard (AAQS) of 20 μg/m3. Cities in southern Chile (south of 35°S) suffer from severe air pollution coming from residential wood burning (Villalobos et al, 2017).
Government response is to generate Air Quality Management Plans (AQMP, PDA in Spanish), after an exceedance to an AAQS has been measured; then a set of initiatives are promoted. In cities where wood burning is a dominant source, measures such as a stove change out program, promoting dry wood sales and subsidies for housing thermal refurbishment are among the ones implemented by local authorities.
We assess the effectiveness of this Government policy by estimating trends in ambient PM2.5 in those southern cities that have implemented an AQMP, and compare them with close cities that do not have such a program.
Another issue is that smaller cities (population < 100,000 inhabitants) do not have ambient air quality monitoring, so they are not included in the aforementioned AQMP.
We analyze as case study the city of Molina (35.1°S, 71.3°W, population: 40,000 inhabitants) located 13 km south of Curicó (35°S, 71.2°W, population: 103,000 inhabitants) where ambient monitoring has been carried out by Government since 2012. We show results of a short-term ambient PM2.5 campaign carried out in winter 2018 with filters. We confirm that ambient PM2.5 concentrations in Molina are similar to those measured at Curicó, the closest city with routine ambient monitoring. Thus, Government policies ought to consider this environmental justice issue in the coming years.
References: [1] A. Van Donkelaar et al., Environmental Science and Technology. 50, 3762–3772 (2016). [2] A. M. Villalobos, F. Barraza, H. Jorquera, J. J. Schauer. Environmental Pollution. 225, 514–523 (2017).