Lunch and Learn – Indoor Air Quality: Science, Practice, Legislation

Topic: Indoor Air Quality: Science, Practice, Legislation

Presenter: Distinguished Professor Lidia Morawska

Description:

Despite decades of effort by many experts and a wealth of evidence about the magnitude of the problem, the issue of indoor air quality (IAQ) in public buildings, including healthcare facilities, has attracted little attention. Indoor air pollution originates from both indoor and outdoor sources. In addition to sources that people operate indoors (including medical procedures in healthcare facilities), create or introduce to indoor environments, emissions also arise from humans in the form of respiratory effluents (including pathogens and therefore increased risk of infection transmission) and body odours. 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. In the absence of standards, what can we practically do to improve IAQ? When deciding on actions, several general aspects must be considered.  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 measured to provide information on IAQ based on existing technologies; and in the future – for compliance with IAQ standards.

About the presenter:

Lidia is a Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. She is the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH) at QUT, a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Air Quality and Health; the Centre Director for the ARC Training Centre for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection Transmission (THRIVE) hosted at QUT; a Vice-Chancellor Fellow, Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE), University of Surrey, United Kingdom; an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research (ECI), at the Jinan University, Guangzhou, China; and a Co-Director in Australia for the Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management (ACC-AQSM).