From Science to Policy: Mandating Indoor Air Quality for Public Buildings | Mai i te pūtaiao ki te kaupapa here: te whakamanatanga o te kounga o te hau i ngā whare tūmatanui
| Wednesday, September 25, 2024 |
| 11:25 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Kawau Room Plenary (Level 3) |
Overview
Lidia Morawska
Supported by Active Pure
Supported by Active Pure
Details
Distinguished Professor Lidia Morawska, Professor and Director, International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health; Co-Director for Australia, Australia-China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management.
Air Quality and Its Impact on Human Health and the Environment
Despite decades of effort by many experts and a large body of evidence about the scale of the problem, the topic of indoor air quality (IAQ) in public buildings has attracted little attention. People in developed countries spend over 90% of their time indoors and there is solid scientific evidence demonstrating the impact of indoor air pollution on health. If human health is affected, this also has an impact on productivity, performance, absenteeism, and the economy. Unlike outdoor air, indoor air is largely unregulated; while national building design standards prescribe ventilation parameters, and emissions from certain building materials in certain countries are regulated, there are basically no IAQ performance standards. Legislated IAQ standards should be the basis for building design and operation, but we cannot routinely monitor indoor air in the same way as outdoor air. Firstly, every indoor space is different, so monitoring needs to be conducted in every public indoor space. Secondly, we cannot use bulky and expensive compliance monitors for every indoor space. And thirdly, pathogens related to indoor airborne infection transmission cannot yet be routinely monitored indoors in real-time. Therefore, we must carefully choose what to monitor, balancing the need to gather information on pollutants that are key health risks or their proxies, but also considering which pollutants can realistically be routinely measured for compliance with IAQ standards based on existing technologies. We are not suggesting that a change in mandating IAQ can be carried out instantaneously. But as a society we are equipped with functioning regulatory processes capable of designing and implementing the necessary regulatory steps to enforce IAQ regulations.
Speaker
Prof Lidia Morawska
International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health
From Science to policy: mandating indoor air quality for public buildings
Biography
Lidia Morawska is Distinguished Professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia; the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at QUT, which is a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Research and Training in the field of Air Quality and Health; and the Centre Director for the ARC Training Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection Transmission (THRIVE) hosted at QUT. Lidia also holds positions of Vice-Chancellor Fellow, Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), University of Surrey, UK; and Adjunct Professor, Institute for Environmental and Climate Research (ECI), Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. She conducts fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health and the environment, with a specific focus on science of airborne particulate matter. She is a physicist and received her doctorate at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. An author of over 1,000 journal papers journal papers, book chapters and refereed conference papers. Lidia has been involved at the executive level with a number of relevant national/international professional bodies, is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and is acting as an advisor to the WHO. She is the recipient of numerous scientific awards.
