Monitoring Air Quality and Improving Environmental Equity

The City of Madison’s sustainability programs prioritize protecting and growing the resilience and health of our community. We are leaders in the Midwest in reducing community exposure to environmental hazards and taking proactive steps to adapt to a changing climate. As we strive to become a national and global leader in local government efforts to build a more sustainable future, we plan our initiatives to not only improve the environment but also to further the City’s mission of advancing social equity.

While climate change is impacting everyone, we know that these impacts are not equally or fairly distributed across people and communities. People with low incomes, communities of color, people with disabilities, people with chronic health conditions, and others are disproportionately impacted by climate hazards and often left out of climate solutions. The City’s sustainability programs aim to advance climate equity – that is, ensuring that everyone benefits from climate solutions, while not bearing an unequal burden of climate change impacts. Our commitment to waste reduction, public transit, energy efficiency, and environmental hazard mitigation also serves to eliminate environmental burdens that have disproportionate impacts.  

We also recognize that environmental and climate inequity are often the result of existing and historic racial, social, environmental, and economic inequities. As part of this recognition, we maintain robust community partnerships, engage widely with local stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds, and innovate to eliminate potential regressive effects from our programs. Our air quality program is an example of how the City centers social equity in sustainability programs.

The new, collaborative project to install a city-wide network of air quality sensors is a good example of these efforts. The project will help map the distribution of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5 and PM10) and raise awareness about the connections between air quality and health in our community. The project is co-led with three local non-profit organizations that provide health-focused programming to communities of color – Latino Health Council, Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, and The Hmong Institute. These partners provide expertise and community engagement to communicate about health hazards related to air quality, inform how the network is designed, and create potential interventions that can reduce community exposure to poor air quality. Collaborating with community-based partners helps ensure that the project engages and benefits individuals who may face greater exposure to poor air quality and have higher risk of respiratory and cardiovascular health conditions, who are disproportionately people of color. Ultimately, our whole community will benefit from a better understanding of local air quality.

We hope as we continue to transform our society into one that is healthy for people and the planet, sustainability and social equity are not seen as competing priorities, but rather as intertwined work that benefits our whole community. Our ability to create a distributed network of air quality monitors was made possible by a grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency under the leadership of Administrator Michael Regan and President Biden.