"Every breath of air that we take, every mouthful of food that we take comes from that the natural world. If we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves." — Sir David Attenborough

Air pollution is the presence of pollutants in air which are detrimental to human health and other life systems around. It is the prime reason for climate change.

Carbon dioxide in air traps the sun’s heat in the earth’s atmosphere causing Green House Effect and makes the environment of earth hotter and hotter. Continous extraction and burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil release carbon dioxide which remains in the atmosphere for several years.

Short lived pollutants like black carbon, methane and ground-level ozone have a higher warming potential. Incomplete combustion of fuels produce these pollutants. Even though black carbon has a lifetime of 4-12 days, the warming impact due to it's presence remains 460-1,500 times higher than carbon dioxide on the climate. Methane gas has a lifetime of 12 years and a warming impact of 84 times higher than carbon dioxide.

Ground-level ozone is formed by the reaction of sunlight with other pollutants like carbon monoxide, methane and nitrogen oxides. It has a lifetime of a few hours to a few weeks and strongly impacts cloud formation, evaporation rates and precipitation levels.

Hence it is essential to reduce air pollution and few activities like promoting ultra low-carbon vehicles, renewable sources of electricity which do not involve combustion, energy efficiency measures and reducing agricultural demand for nitrogen contribute a lot in this context.

Finally to say, the quality of the air we breathe depends mainly on the lifestyle choices we make and by altering our life style wisely reducing air pollution, we will preserve and protect our climate!

A tryst with nature #freshair