Background
Poor ambient air quality affects 99 percent of the global population, posing one of today’s greatest environmental risks to global human health and wellbeing. Anthropogenic air pollution from mobile, area, and point source emissions, along with smoke from wildland fire and dust trans-port from land use and land cover change, degrades air quality in remote wilderness and urban settings. Thus, across settings, knowledge of the underlying social, cultural, and psychological drivers and barriers to realizing good air quality remains deserving of further inquiry and synthesis.
Design and Findings
The papers in this special issue advance our understanding of air quality through empirical and theoretical demonstrations of its human dimensions. The authors account for how individuals, groups, and societies create, interact with, and respond to varying levels of air pollution and their political, economic, and socio-cultural drivers. In doing so, the authors critically address how and with what socio-ecological implications air quality comes to be understood as a resource to be protected. The article presents the first social account of the human dimensions of air quality from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts.
In sum, despite innovative policy analyses and recommendations, the special issue highlights that the complex cognitive, affective, and behavioral relationships humans have with air quality is inextricably linked with issues of social-cultural context. Also, while the physiological responses to air pollution, once exposed, are more democratized, the socio-cultural context of the population in question mediates their cognitions, emotions, and behaviors.
Implications
The issue challenges dominant perspectives of air pollution as a purely material entity and argues for the need to attend to the socio-cultural and political dimensions that define, create, or mitigate poor air quality. These findings suggest the continued importance of both situated research efforts of the human dimensions of air quality to understand contextualized experiences, as well as broader comparative efforts across governance structures, biogeophysical settings, and cultural milieu.
Contact
Chair of Sport and Health Management
Prof. Dr. Jörg Königstorfer
Secretary: Mirjam Merz
Uptown Munich Campus D
Georg-Brauchle-Ring 60/62
80992 Munich Germany
Phone: +49.89.289.24559
Fax: +49.89.289.24642
info.mgt@sg.tum.de