A chronology of global air quality

Abstract

Air pollution has been recognized as a threat to human health since the time of Hippocrates, ca 400 BC. Successive written accounts of air pollution occur in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, show the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centres and close to industry, and the chemical characteristics of the gases and particulate matter. The industrial revolution accelerated both the magnitude of emissions of the primary pollutants and the geographical spread of contributing countries as highly polluted cities became the defining issue, culminating with the great smog of London in 1952. Europe and North America dominated emissions and suffered the majority of adverse effects until the latter decades of the twentieth century, by which time the transboundary issues of acid rain, forest decline and ground-level ozone became the main environmental and political air quality issues. As controls on emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides (SO 2 and NO x ) began to take effect in Europe and North America, emissions in East and South Asia grew strongly and dominated global emissions by the early years of the twenty-first century. The effects of air quality on human health had also returned to the top of the priorities by 2000 as new epidemiological evidence emerged. By this time, extensive networks of surface measurements and satellite remote sensing provided global measurements of both primary and secondary pollutants. Global emissions of SO 2 and NO x peaked, respectively, in ca 1990 and 2018 and have since declined to 2020 as a result of widespread emission controls. By contrast, with a lack of actions to abate ammonia, global emissions have continued to grow. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Air quality, past present and future’.

Opinion: Papers that shaped Tropospheric Chemistry

“…It has been claimed that "acid rain was one of the most important environmental issues during the last decades of the twentieth century" (Grennfelt et al, 2019) (see Table 1). One of the reasons is that acid rain first demonstrated that air quality was not merely a local issue but a regional issue and showed that the atmosphere has no definite boundaries (Fowler et al, 2020). Although the case of acid rain and its effects had been noted and reported by some earlier papers e.g., Odèn (1968), for some, it is the paper by Likens and Bormann (1974) that made this issue known to the science community at large.…”

“…Air pollution (née composition) and its impacts have a history stretching back to antiquity -see for example the expositions in (Brimblecombe, 1987;Fuller, 2018;Jacobson, 2002;Stern, 1968;Sportisse, 2010;Preining and Davis, 1999;Fowler et al, 2020) and others. Changes in atmospheric composition, with their negative impact particularly on human health (Lelieveld et al, 2015), ecosystems (Fowler et al, 2009) and latterly links to their climate (see for example, (Fiore et al, 2012;von Schneidemesser et al, 2015)), have become primary global concerns during the 20 th century.…”

The impact of air pollution on terrestrial managed and natural vegetation

“…As a consequence of air pollution legislation, concentrations of SO 2 declined steadily in many developed countries from about 1970. By 2015, there were no significant areas of Europe or North America experiencing concentrations of SO 2 at levels damaging to plants from anthropogenic sources [26]. In East Asia peak emissions were later, but since 2012 emissions of SO 2 in China have declined by approximately 40%.…”

“…Emissions of NO 2 peaked around 1990 in Europe, rather later than SO 2 due to the rapid growth in vehicle usage, as well as industry and the slower introduction of effective controls on vehicle NO 2 emissions. Thus, concentrations of NO 2 remained high in urban and many rural areas through to the early years of the twenty-first century in Europe and North America [26].…”

Alkaline air: changing perspectives on nitrogen and air pollution in an ammonia-rich world

“…Over recent decades ammonia (NH 3 ) has often seemed like the Cinderella of air pollution, as it has been given much less attention than other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), nitrogen oxides (NO x ), ozone (O 3 ) and particulate matter (PM). In the 1980s, research focused on 'acid rain', especially in the light of SO 2 and NO x emissions [1][2][3] with only a few researchers at that time examining the possible effects of NH 3 and ammonium (NH 4 + ) on the environment, including threats to soils, biodiversity and forest health [4][5][6]. The same can be said for European air pollution policy, with successive international protocols on SO 2 and NO x emissions [7,8], preceding the multi-pollutant, multi-effect Gothenburg Protocol [9], which included NH 3 for the first time.…”