You may have seen the before-and-after-lockdown photos of major cities that appear to show dramatic changes in air quality. In one, the India Gate war memorial in New Delhi is barely visible amid the smog. Then, during lockdown, it’s clearly visible in its red Bharatpur stone grandness.
Getting vehicles off the road may do wonders for smog, but there’s more to air pollution than that. The shift away from vehicles powered by fossil fuels and the improvement of outdoor air quality in urban areas, combined with changes to buildings and lifestyles, means that indoor air pollution will become much more important in the future. And there aren’t many easy answers about how much of a risk this will create – or how to address it.
Vehicles have been a dominant source of air pollutants for decades. But the century-long dominance of petroleum-based fuels is drawing to an end with the increasingly rapid rollout of electric vehicles. A consequence of this will be a fall in concentrations of highly reactive gases called nitrogen oxides, which actually neutralise another pollutant from industrial sources, ozone. So fewer petrol and diesel-fuelled cars, coupled with lower emissions from those that remain, could actually result in higher ozone concentrations in urban areas.
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