COVID-19 Turns Attention to Indoor Air Quality
Tuesday, 1st February 2022
With the world focusing on viral risk, indoor air quality (IAQ) has become a hot topic everywhere
The EU is expected to include IAQ policies in its 2023 Zero Pollution Action Plan, which aims to reduce deaths caused by air pollution by 2030
Europeans spend 90% of their time indoors, but indoor air can be 5 times more polluted than air outdoors
“A great awakening” in our attitudes to indoor air quality
The COVID-19 pandemic has awoken the world to the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ), researchers and campaigners have said.
While efforts to tackle air pollution have long focused on outdoor air quality, indoor air can be 5 times as polluted as outdoor air, studies have shown.
The change in attitudes has largely been attributed to the way that IAQ monitoring has become a key tool in preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
There has been “a real change in the perception of citizens, but also policymakers and industries and economic actors,” Corinne Mandin, president of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, told Politico.
For example, global health authorities are encouraging the use of particulate air filters, while, in the UK, improved ventilation has been written into new building regulations.
“It feels like the Great Awakening,” Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings programme at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Wired.
“Finally the world has woken up to the importance of healthy buildings.”
Encouraging action
Now, the issue of indoor air quality is having a political impact.
“The issue of indoor air quality has indeed received greater attention in the pandemic context also at EU level,” a European Commission official told Politico.
In 2021, for example, the Commission launched a call for research projects aimed at improving IAQ.
Meanwhile, in 2023, the EU is expected to propose legislative measures to tackle IAQ as part of its Zero Pollution Action Plan, which aims to reduce premature deaths from air pollution by 55% by 2030.
But campaigners want more.
In a letter to the journal Science, experts including Joseph Allen called for a “paradigm shift” in improving indoor ventilation standards.
“For decades, the focus of architects and building engineers was on thermal comfort, odour control, perceived air quality, initial investment cost, energy use, and other performance issues, whereas infection control was neglected,” they wrote.
Similarly, campaigners want the EU to systematise its air quality rules, in order to create a framework that is relevant to both indoor and outdoor air.
Data will be key to IAQ improvements
Yet experts warn that these changes could take some time.
“The pandemic has made us realise that we don’t really know very much about quite a lot of our buildings,” Timothy Sharpe, head of architecture at the University of Strathclyde, has said.
“We actually have very little data on how buildings are actually performing [or] what their ventilation levels are like.”
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