Mohammed A Ayoub
Doha, Qatar: Education City at Qatar Foundation is serving as a test bed for ground-breaking research to measure air quality as part of measures to contribute to sustainability and climate change adaptation measures.
Air pollution is one of the greatest environmental threats to the planet’s health. It is the source of approximately seven million premature deaths annually and countless illnesses.
Speaking to The Peninsula recently, Mohammed A Ayoub, Senior Research Director at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), said while air quality in Greater Doha has improved, social behaviours due to infrastructure development and the ensuing products of extensive construction are being studied to determine the impact on air quality.
“We have a project, the Education City Low Air Pollution Exposure Zone (Project ECLAPEZ). The idea is to monitor high spatial density, ambient air quality, and air quality inside buildings in Edu-cation City and understand our individual and cumulative air pollution exposure continuum,” Ayoub disclosed.
He noted that the initiative, sponsored by the CEO’s office at QF, is part of a set of sustainability measures targeted at using Education City as a pilot study area for greater implementation across Doha and possibly the entire country.“Education City is unique because it is a microcosm of Greater Doha. We have a convention centre, universities, hotels, hospitals, and schools. We have all different types of people working and living in Education City. So why not use this as a test bed for different applications?” he added.
Dust storms and emissions from vehicles and industry are Doha’s leading causes of polluted air. In 2020, Qatar was named among the countries with the highest levels of air pollution in the Middle East. It was found to have over 76 microns per cubic metre of fine particulate matter PM2.5 – the most harmful air quality pollutant.
Ayoub said understanding cumulative air exposure using different scenarios to measure internal and external air quality and its effects on health and pro-ductivity would ensure better understanding, aid the imple-mentation of intervention strategies and highlight how to improve these strategies regionally and internationally. He emphasized that this would ensure a better under-standing and aid the imple-mentation of intervention strategies and how they can be improved nationwide, regionally and internationally.
“We’re currently working with the Ministry of Public Health on developing indoor air quality guidelines for schools. We’ve had a project with them for a few years to measure indoor air quality in classrooms while students are present to understand the existing state of indoor air quality and where the new guidelines can be used,” Ayoub said, adding that these guidelines will help schools know their responsibilities in terms of maintaining good indoor air quality for the students.
Speaking about the recent rainfall intensity in Qatar, Ayoub said research institutes across the country registered significant levels of rain above the historic average around this time of the year.
He disclosed that high wind speeds were also recorded, citing the Hamad bin Khalifa University Research and Development Complex, which recorded wind speeds as high as 75km/h.
According to him, there is a growing understanding that climate change could be multiplying the effects of the threats associated with these severe downpours, especially at the beginning of the season when the ground and the air are still warm.“We’re seeing differences across the urban area with more rainfall on the western than on the coastal side.
That also tells us that the effect of the urban environment could be multiplying that as well.
These considerations are critical for us from a resilience perspective. We are also looking at infrastructure to understand what we have today versus five years ago and how we as a country can be better prepared for these types of storms.
“The most important part for us on the adaptation side for climate change is working with the relevant entities in the country to increase our resilience to some of these changes that we’re experiencing that could be attributed to climate change”.
