The Annual General Meeting of the Highlands local group takes place in Macaulay Suite B, James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen at 5 pm on Monday 4th December 2023 preceded by a Seminar at 4pm with tea from 3.30 pm.
The Annual General Meeting of the Highlands local group takes place in Macaulay Suite B, James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen at 5 pm on Monday 4th December 2023.
The meeting will be preceded by a Seminar by Duncan Lee of Glasgow University on Air pollution in Scotland: Trends, health effects, Covid-19 and the elephant in the room at 4 pm (also in the Hutton Institute) with tea from 3.30 pm.
Abstract for seminar:
Air pollution continues to be a global health problem, with the World Health Organization (WHO) linking seven million deaths to fine particulate matter alone each year (WHO, 2016). While the levels of air pollution in Scotland are relatively low in global terms, it remains a government priority to reduce concentrations even further. This talk gives a summary of the current air pollution context in Scotland, and highlights some key future research directions. It covers a number of different areas within the air pollution arena, beginning with current government policies that attempt to reduce concentrations, such as the introduction of Low Emission Zones (LEZ) and successive Cleaner Air For Scotland (CAFS) strategies. It then presents the temporal trends in Scottish air pollution for a range of pollutants, including in both urban and rural locations. The final main topic for the talk quantifies the health effects of air pollution, and illustrates a couple of Scottish studies that focus on both Covid-19 and non-Covid health end points. The talk then ends with a discussion of future research directions in the air pollution arena, including a summary of the elephant in the room.
Duncan Lee (University of Glasgow)