A Clean Air Plan for Sydney

Sydney's Clean Air Plan was led by Professor Clare Murphy, Director of the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry. “Air pollution in Sydney is dominated by human-created emissions,” Professor Murphy said. “Our research shows residential wood-smoke, hazard-reduction burns, traffic emissions and emissions from industry and power generation contribute significantly to air pollutants.

The first two recommendations in Sydney’s Clean Air Plan (explained on the University of Wollongong's website) are:

Phase out the use of wood heaters in urban areas and some regional areas;
New policies, infrastructure and services to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, including better pedestrian and cycle paths, more public transport, and congestion taxes;

Prof Murphy’s research builds on the work of the NSW EPA, whose air emissions inventory for PM2.5 (the most health-hazardous air pollutant) shows how residential wood heater emissions (purple line with triangle markers) dominates all other sources of emissions including household emissions (sky blue), road transport (red), non-road equipment and transport (dark purple), EPA licensed industry (pink), commercial businesses (purple) and natural sources (aqua blue). The graph below of Sydney’s PM2.5 emissions is Figure 4 on the EPA’s web page about woodsmoke.

New Scientist Report and Video: log-burning stoves are harming our health and speeding up global warming (Feb 2017) https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155097669589589 WHO: Breathe Life 80 sec video: How air pollution impacts your body. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVBeY1jSG9Y Air pollution is an invisible killer that lurks all around us, preying on the young and old. Learn how it slips unnoticed past our body's defenses causing deaths from heart attack, strokes, lung disease and cancer. UNICEF 170 sec video: What does Air Pollution PM 2.5 do inside children's body and brain? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcS3ovdsgNI A Dropbox folder https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vacszgm9lgqn8al/AAAEbso89eZeZRv1pjTU5cVla?dl=0 contains key information including: The Report by Council’s Wood Smoke Advisory Group, Slides from an Invited talk on Armidale’s air pollution measurements to the Biomass Smoke in The Human Environment Conference (June 2019), Information on the health costs of allowing new wood heaters List of 15 documented misleading claims from vested interests Flatten the COVID-19 curve by Cleaning Up our Air

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