EPA’s air pollution monitoring network has gaps that will make it impossible to fully enforce a new key air quality rule, researchers found.
The agency’s network of roughly 1,000 air monitors overlooks critical soot hot spots that disproportionately affect low-income communities and people of color, a study published by the American Chemical Society on Tuesday found. The gaps could mean that millions of people will not benefit from the stricter standards EPA finalized earlier this year to limit exposure to soot.
Specifically, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington found that current air quality monitoring means 2.8 million people live within undetected soot hot spots and roughly 20 million people reside within a metro area lacking adequate soot monitoring.
“The national air pollution monitoring network aims to act as an umbrella to protect all Americans,” said the study’s lead author, Yuzhou Wang, a researcher with UC Berkeley, in a release. “But we saw that unfortunately, millions of people, especially underrecognized populations, will not receive adequate protection from the monitors. Thus, they will receive fewer benefits from the more stringent standard.”
