On the 8th October, people around the world will be celebrating Clean Air Day, and working to help make the air on Planet Earth better for the people, animals and plants that live on it.
Clean Air Day 2020 will take place entirely online
THE IMPORTANCE OF CLEAN AIR
It’s easy to take the air we breathe for granted. We often don’t even think about it, even though it’s everywhere.
The average person takes over 17,000 breaths a day. That means over 8.6 litres of air passing into and out of our lungs. Air contains many elements such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and it’s essential for life.
For us humans, the oxygen in air is important for the chemical reactions in our cells that give us energy and power us. For plants, it’s the carbon dioxide that’s important, helping fuel photosynthesis which is what gives them their energy.
In fact, probably the only times we really think about the air we breathe is when something in it affects us. Some of this can be relatively benign; hay fever is a good example, when the air contains pollen particles from plants that can aggravate our noses, throats and eyes, causing us to sneeze and snuffle. Pollution is another example; we’ve all coughed and spluttered when a car has gone past and left a trail of exhaust fumes in its wake, or crinkled our noses at the smell of a busy road.
But some of these pollutants in the air can have a much more serious effect than just smelling bad. Air pollution can make people sick, it can cause death, and we all know it has a serious effect on the climate of our planet.
Certain chemicals or pollutants in the air can cause lung disease or aggravate conditions like asthma. It can affect the health of plants, or lead to things like acid rain which can cause plants to grow poorly or even die, which in turn has an effect on the animals and insects that rely on them for food and shelter. And pollutants like higher-than-normal levels of carbon dioxide can lead to global climate change, causing sea levels to rise or extreme weather events like storms and floods and fires to become more common.
But we CAN work to fix this.
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Video credit: the Jane Goodall Institute
