As pollution levels drop worldwide amid stay-at-home orders, researchers consider what this might mean for the future.
It is one of the few silver linings around the dark cloud that is COVID-19: In normally smog-choked Los Angeles, air quality this week was among the best of any major city in the world. That’s according to the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir, which keeps tabs on pollution levels internationally.
Similar improvements have been measured over cities in Europe — Madrid, Milan, Rome and Paris — as well as in India and China.
The news doesn’t surprise economists and environmental scholars, who see the logic behind pollution dropping as people stay home en masse and whole sectors of the economy shut down, but it does have researchers pondering what this development suggests about the future in regards to production, policy and the environment.
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