Environmental issues: Water and air quality
Air quality and pollution
Air quality can be defined as the amount of pollution in the air from all sources, natural or human defines the quality of the air we breathe. Air pollution is not limited to your city and it can blow into any part of your city from any near location.
With so much pollution affecting human health, indoor and outdoor air quality is by far the most important. According to the EPA, 86%-96% of all social benefits come from the regulation of air pollution. Air and water quality has always been
an environmental issue in cities because of waste.
Low air quality can affect anyone’s health. It can have direct effects on the lungs, and it can deteriorate an existing condition such as asthma. Various people are more sensible to air quality than others. The most exposed to bad air quality are the kids who are growing fast and old people with a weak immune system.
Taking just one example from hundreds, a global funded study from 1981 to 1989 of some 500,000 adults in 150 urban areas found a 17 percent increase in mortality among the population of the most polluted areas in the world. Air quality specialists assumed that these increased deaths were caused by particulates and ozone. It randomly proposed new clean air global standards in 1996 by dropping the maximum particle size from 10 to 2.5 micrometers and maximum ground level ozone levels from 0.12 to 0.08 parts per million.
Water quality
We want our water to be safe for drinking, washing, and other uses. However human activities associated to different land use and land management practices can have a crash on the water quality of a community.
Almost all urban areas have impermeable surfaces that keep precipitation events, such as rainwater and snowmelt from percolating into the ground. Even turf grass lawns limit the water flow into the ground and actually become practically as impervious as paved surfaces because of turf grass’s densely matted root structure. During and after a rainstorm, water rushing off solid surfaces can be significant. This water is called runoff water. Runoff can be straight associated with erosion and sedimentary rock formation, flooding and water quality degradation. Water that does penetrate into the ground after a precipitation event can carry contaminants from different waste to areas that may pose a risk to the health of people exposed to it.
The best ways to protect the water quality of an area is to reduce the disruption of the natural water cycle, the constant movement of water on the surface of the Earth.