Join Terra.do for this special keynote address from Dr. Sarath Guttikunda on climate change’s effect on air quality on both the urban, regional, and global scales. Dr. Sarath will explore how local data from monitoring and modeling studies were a key factor in climate policy efforts in India and beyond.
As populations around the world urbanize, air quality in cities has crucial implications for both human health and climate mitigation. Like many other effects of climate change, air quality often has the worst impacts on those without the resources to protect themselves. There's a critical link between global greenhouse gas strategies and local city air quality management strategies – solutions for each level have to account for its effects on other scales.
You'll learn about the current state of global air quality along with its impacts on human health, and how we can mitigate the worst effects as climate change intensifies the problem.
About Dr Sarath
Dr. Sarath Guttikunda is the founder/director of UrbanEmissions.Info (UEinfo, India), an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (New Delhi, India) and an affiliate professor at Desert Research Institute (Reno, USA). His main research interest is air quality analysis at urban, regional, and global scales and finding ways to bridge the gap between science, policy, and public awareness. He is the developer of the SIM-air (Simple Interactive Models for Better Air Quality) family of tools, capable of assessing air pollution scenarios in a multi-pollutant environment. UEinfo launched India's only open air quality forecasting platform, disseminating modeled forecasts and source contributions for the next 3 days; and other policy-relevant information for all the districts in India and also launched the APnA city program designed to support the needs of city's long-term air quality management planning, with applications in Asian, African, and Latin American cities. In India, Dr Guttikunda and his team are currently supporting the National Clean Air Programme for 131 non-attainment cities with their air pollution information needs.
Dr Guttikunda received his PhD from the University of Iowa (2002); Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (1997); is a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow (1999-2002); a TED fellow (2009-), and is the recipient of AGU's International Award (2022) given annually in recognition of furthering the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of society in developing nations.
