The Institute for Energy and the Environment (IEMA) have launched the new Platform for Air Quality with new features in the monitoring of the air quality in the country. One of the highlights is that only nine states – Ceará, Pernambuco, Bahia, Goiás, Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul – plus the Federal District, have air quality monitoring stations in the country. David Tsai, the project coordinator at IEMA, explains that the monitoring is insufficient, both in terms of spatial coverage and coverage by pollutant.

“The platform exists because, in addition to the insufficiency of the coverage by the network to monitor the air quality, there is also a gap in the country for an information system that gathers all the data and organizes, standardizes, publishes and discloses it, so that society has this tool to know about the quality of the air it breathes,” he explains.

The opening of the launch event for the new platform was performed by Marcel Martin, coordinator of the Transport portfolio of iCS, and André Luis Ferreira, the CEO of IEMA. The objective of the work is to support the public management of air quality, generating accessible information and the promotion of science. It has valuable content: air pollution is responsible for damage to health and exacerbates respiratory, cardiovascular and neurological diseases, in addition to producing negative effects on ecosystems, causing harm to agriculture and urban environments.

Watch the launch and learn about the platform .

On the same subject, the World Health Organization has revised the acceptable limits for air pollution, which would determine a reduction of 80% of the deaths related to this cause. Today, statistically, there are 7 million deaths in the world every year due to pollution. Watch the discussion on GloboNews .