Kingston Air Quality Initiative at Bard College Reports After Three Years of Monitoring
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College is pleased to announce the findings of the Kingston Air Quality Initiative (KAQI) after three consecutive years of research and data collection. KAQI began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Sciences Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have facilitated both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring projects throughout Ulster County.
Kingston Air Quality Initiative at Bard College Reports After Three Years of Monitoring
KAQI began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Sciences Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have facilitated both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring projects throughout Ulster County. Standing as the first air quality study of its kind in Kingston, KAQI’s monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution as measured from the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston.
KAQI’s main monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5), made up of microscopic particles that are the products of burning fuel, and is released into the air through exhausts from oil burners, gas burners, automobiles, cooking, grilling, and both indoor and outdoor wood burning. PM 2.5 particles are so tiny, they stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, allowing them to travel long distances before depositing. When these particles are inhaled, they can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, creating or exacerbating health issues. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “small particulate pollution has health impacts even at very low concentrations – indeed no threshold has been identified below which no damage to health is observed.”
After 3 years of monitoring in Kingston, air quality trends associated with daily activities are observable. The findings show that air pollution in the city is variable and appears to have a seasonal context—higher levels of pollution are shown during colder months (associated with fuel burning), and lower levels are generally seen in spring and summer. The difference between levels seen during 2020—when COVID shut down many activities and resulted in a decrease in vehicles on the road—and pollution levels detected in years since is also significant.
Two important measures of PM2.5 air quality are the annual mean standard and the 24-hour average standard. Kingston’s PM2.5 air quality met the annual standards of both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the WHO, although it came close to exceeding the latter. For the 24-hour standard, air quality met the EPA’s but exceeded the WHO’s.
As of January, 2023, a revision was proposed to change the EPA's primary public health-based annual standard from its current level of 12.0 micrograms per meter squared to the range of 9.0-10.0 micrograms per meter squared. This revision would lean closer toward, but not come close to meeting, the WHO's PM 2.5 annual standard of 5 micrograms per meter squared. Based on the EPA annual mean calculations, these values come close to exceeding the WHO annual standard.
One factor associated with instances of air quality breaching the WHO’s 24-hour threshold is the development of atmospheric inversions, which occur when the temperature of the atmosphere increases instead of decreases with altitude and surface level air parcels are unable to rise up, trapping any present air pollution at ground level. Being in the Hudson Valley, Kingston is more susceptible to inversion events as the air is blocked from all directions. It's possible that, if Kingston residents were aware of when these events are occurring, we could start making different decisions about woodburning and car use during these times to make our air cleaner for all. Another potential factor may be pollutants from smoke carried from wildfires on the West Coast.
More detail about KAQI’s findings can be found at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities website: https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/
“While our annual averages meet EPA standards, as many residents of Kingston and the surrounding areas know, air quality at ground level can vary widely from neighborhood to neighborhood,” said Lorraine Farina, co-founder of KAQI and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition, and former Kingston CAC air quality sub-committee chair. “The average adult takes in 1000 breaths per hour, and exposures to dangerous fine particulate matter very much depend on whether wood is being burned nearby, as burning wood is dirtier and more polluting than burning oil, gas, or coal. There is no safe level of exposure to PM 2.5, so the expanding neighborhood-level monitoring efforts of the Bard Community Science Lab will help residents understand the actual air quality right where they are breathing, so we can all make choices that benefit both our health and that of the planet.”
“I want to thank Bard and the Community Sciences Lab for allowing Kingston to participate in this initiative,” said Steve Noble, the mayor of Kingston. “I am pleased to see that our air quality is superior to many of the places around us, but it’s a profound reminder that our daily activities do impact our health, and the health of our environment. We appreciate Bard’s investment in monitoring Kingston’s air, as it has been an invaluable learning tool. Together with Kingston’s Conservation Advisory Council, we will continue to monitor local air quality alerts, and will continue to work together with leaders in our region on policy and initiatives for cleaner air.”
Dr. Eli Dueker, co-director of the Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, added, “Clean air is something we often take for granted in the Hudson Valley. Our findings show that meeting annual EPA standards (particularly current standards) is one thing, but on a day-to-day basis, our air quality is sometimes degraded and can be unhealthy. After all, we are not breathing on an average yearly basis—we are breathing on a second-by-second basis. We can make decisions as a community to keep our own air clean – for example, we could reduce or even stop our wood-burning in city limits (particularly on days with atmospheric inversions), reduce our car use, and make our homes more energy efficient.”
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College, in collaboration with KAQI, has been working on a handful of air quality related projects centralized around community needs and concerns. These include:
- Developing a publicly-accessible atmospheric inversion monitoring system for the Kingston area.
- Neighborhood-level air quality monitoring, through the fast-developing Hudson Valley Library Air Quality Network. Using outdoor real-time air quality monitoring devices stationed at public libraries, air quality data is free and accessible online. We are always looking for new locations throughout the Hudson Valley to add to the network and provide more localized data for residents. If any libraries are interested, please reach out to [email protected].
- In partnership with SUNY-Albany, conducting indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring in homes with woodsmoke, mold and structurally-related air quality challenges.
For more information or ways to get involved, please visit https://kingston-ny.gov/airquality or https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/.
Post Date: 06-06-2023
Climate Despair to Climate Repair: Global Teach-in on Climate Change, Led by Bard College, to Be Held March 29, 2023
Through a global initiative led by Bard College, more than 250 colleges, universities, and high schools worldwide will engage students and teachers in 40 countries to move from “Climate Despair to Climate Repair.” Now in its fourth year, the Global Teach-in is meant to help participants move from despair to determination, working together to change the future. On Wednesday, March 29, Bard will host its own teach-in from 5–8 pm in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. A free, low-carbon dinner will be provided alongside “People and Planet Working on Climate Repair,” a panel discussion led by Professors Felicia Keesing and Eban Goodstein. The evening will culminate in discussion groups focused on climate solutions.Climate Despair to Climate Repair: Global Teach-in on Climate Change, Led by Bard College, to Be Held March 29, 2023
On Wednesday, March 29, Bard will host its own teach-in from 5–8 pm in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. A free, low-carbon dinner will be provided alongside “People and Planet Working on Climate Repair,” a panel discussion led by Professors Felicia Keesing and Eban Goodstein. The evening will culminate in discussion groups focused on climate solutions. In addition to the teach-in, 40 Bard courses will integrate climate discussion into their classes this week, and on March 30, a Climate Game Night will be held in Kline Commons.
The Worldwide Teach-in is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in partnership with educators across the world. The project has received support from the Open Society University Network, Lever for Change, an affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, and the United States Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.
Post Date: 03-28-2023
Bard College Awarded $26,532 Grant from New World Foundation and Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley for Sustainability Project
Bard College is pleased to announce that it has received a $26,532 grant from the New World Foundation and the Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley for the project “Bard Bee-Lives: Making Space for At-Risk Pollinators.” Managed by Laurie Husted, Chief Sustainability Officer at Bard, the project was the result of a student proposal developed in the spring of 2022 in an Open Society University Network (OSUN) social entrepreneurship practicum: Leading Change in Organizations.Bard College Awarded $26,532 Grant from New World Foundation and Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley for Sustainability Project
The project will transform a twelve-acre cornfield into a pollinator habitat on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, and will support pollinator health, cultivate biodiversity, support sourcing and propagating native seeds, build soil health, and manage invasive species. It is a critical early step in the “Pollinate Now” initiative, a bioregional strategy for habitat restoration in the Hudson River Estuary Watershed, developed by Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley together with Landscape Interactions.
The “Bard Bee-Lives” project is designed to attract and sustain a wide range of native bee, butterfly, and moth species that are currently at risk of local extinction in the Hudson Valley. Bard is committed to properly implementing the site-specific design and to continue the long-term habitat management required of this effort, with the hope that the varied habitat meadow will eventually be self-sustaining with limited intervention. The list of native plants and the site design developed during the project will be publicly shared, allowing for it to be replicated throughout the region at different scales.
“This new pollen, nectar, and habitat-rich plant community will support more than 100 species of pollinators and will strengthen the ecosystem services this plot of land had previously lost as a cornfield,” said Amy Parrella, Director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “This will also be a native planting and bee nesting demonstration site for residential homeowners, landscape professionals, and farmers.”
The New World Foundation is rooted in a long tradition of advancing ever-compelling challenges to economic equity, democratic rights, and civic participation in the United States. As a national community foundation, it aims to strengthen community-based organizations and local leadership, working from the bottom up to build coalitions around issues that converge in place, creating alliances locally and building movements nationally. Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley is an organization which develops programs, gives grants, and offers strategic and operational consulting in order to combat barriers to local ecological action.
Post Date: 02-21-2023
More BOS News
-
Bard’s MBA in Sustainability Ranked No. 1 Green MBA for Third Straight Year, Climbs to No. 2 for Nonprofit Management
Bard’s MBA in Sustainability Ranked No. 1 Green MBA for Third Straight Year, Climbs to No. 2 for Nonprofit Management
For the third year in a row, the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program has been ranked as the Best Green MBA in the Princeton Review’s 2023 Business Schools rankings. Bard also moved up in the top 10 list for Best MBA for Nonprofits, to the no. 2 slot in the United States, surpassing the MBA programs at Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown.
The honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 17,800 students enrolled at 224 MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans.
Post Date: 02-07-2023
-
OSUN Students Developing Online Game to Make Sex Education Accessible to Teens around the World
OSUN Students Developing Online Game to Make Sex Education Accessible to Teens around the World
Alua Samat ’25, a Bard College student and activist for sex education, partnered with four other students from Bard and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) to create Not a Shame, an online game which is being designed to be a resource for teenagers across the globe. In development as part of the online OSUN Network Collaborative Course Social Entrepreneurship, the game will differ from other existing sex education games in that it seeks to be more accessible to communities with specific cultural sensitivities and needs, and where global languages such as English or Russian are not widely spoken. Samat has collaborated with others for years to combat the stigmas that surround sexual education for teenagers. Reliable information on sex and family planning are sparse in Kazakhstan, where she is from, and young people can be left with no options but to learn from dubious online sources presenting inaccurate or harmful material, a contributing factor to the rate of teen pregnancy in Central Asia, which is over six times higher than in developed countries. Not a Shame intends to serve as an approachable and trustworthy information source which can be adapted to help teenagers in their local languages and with accompanying narratives that are relevant to their lives and cultures.
In December 2022, it was announced that Samat’s team would be awarded a prize of $1,500 in the annual pitch competition sponsored by Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. Bermet Suiutbekova, the group’s instructor at AUCA, said that the game “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.”
Post Date: 01-24-2023
-
Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude to Lead Regenerative Dye Research as Part of Daughters for Earth Grant
Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude to Lead Regenerative Dye Research as Part of Daughters for Earth Grant
As part of one of 26 women-led projects in 17 countries, Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude will participate in a project to regenerate natural fabric dyeing processes with traditional Moroccan weavers as part of a Daughters for Earth grant awarded to Around the World in 80 Fabrics. “These grants, totaling over $600,000, are a part of our mission to deliver critical resources into the hands of the women on the frontlines of climate action,” says Daughters for Earth of this year’s grant winners. Professor Jude will lead microbial dye foraging alongside our natural plant dye research as part of a team that “will bring together traditional weavers, researchers, designers, textile experts, scientists, anthropologists, and businesswomen to create sustainable dyeing processes that Ain Leuh Women's Cooperative can use.” The cooperative, which was founded by local women in the Atlas Mountain region of Morocco, has used traditional weaving techniques to support their families for decades. Today, because of the pressures of demand from global trade, synthetic dyes are used more frequently, produced with chemicals that impact weaver health and the environment. The collaboration between the Ain Leuh Cooperative, Artisan Project, Around the World in 80 Fabrics, the Microbe Institute, and Bard College will help to create “an open-source natural dye, plant, and microbial resource book with a map and dye recipes,” with the goal of improving the health of Ain Leuh weavers and the health of the local ecosystem.
Post Date: 01-08-2023
-
Bard Biologists Elias Dueker, Gabriel Perron, Daniella Azulai ’17, and Mary Reid ’21 Copublish Study on the Impacts of Wastewater Treatment Discharge in Saw Kill River
Bard Biologists Elias Dueker, Gabriel Perron, Daniella Azulai ’17, and Mary Reid ’21 Copublish Study on the Impacts of Wastewater Treatment Discharge in Saw Kill River
Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies M. Elias Dueker, Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel G. Perron, and Bard biology graduates Daniella Azulai ’17 and Mary Reid ’21 have copublished a new study, “Bacteria communities and water quality parameters in riverine water and sediments near wastewater discharges,” in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Data. Over five months, they monitored microbial contaminants relating to the treated water outflow of the wastewater treatment plant operated by Bard, which releases into the Saw Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River and also the source of fresh water for the campus. This is the first of many datasets and research papers that they hope to publish on Bard’s water system. Preliminary data analyses provide insight into the impacts of watershed-wide usage of the Saw Kill as both drinking water source and treated sewage receiver. Future use of this dataset will include a focus on endotoxins and antibiotic resistant bacterial genes, water contaminants only now gaining broader attention in water quality and microbiological sciences.
All of the sampling was conducted as a joint Bard Summer Research Institute project between Dueker’s lab and Perron's lab in summer 2015. Lab members included: Marco Spodek ’17, Beckett Lansbury ’16, Yuejiao Wan ’17, Pola Kuhn ’17, Haley Goss-Holmes ’17. Coauthors Azulai and Reid worked on this project both as undergraduate and post-baccalaureate students.
“This project demonstrates the power of community asking scientific questions, and academia–students, faculty, and staff–being able to help answer those questions through careful observational and applied research,” said Dueker. “Our hope is that this database serves as a tool for researchers and communities around the world trying to respond to stewardship challenges in a science-based and community-accessible way.”
Post Date: 10-04-2022
-
What Is Your Why? Laurie Husted Talks about Sustainability Work on Campus and Off
-
From Dumpster to Donation: Poughkeepsie Journal Highlights Efforts of Bard and Local College Students to Reduce Summer Move-Out Waste
From Dumpster to Donation: Poughkeepsie Journal Highlights Efforts of Bard and Local College Students to Reduce Summer Move-Out Waste
“Each year, thousands of pounds of solid waste is created at the end of colleges’ academic years. But, several area schools are taking steps to reduce that total,” writes Saba Ali for the Poughkeepsie Journal. Local area college students have worked to collect, sort, and donate items that can be used by others, and colleges like Bard are beginning to institutionalize such sustainability efforts for future generations. “Bard College tries to match up the items that may be needed in the community, such as donating binders, which are distributed to the Red Hook Central School District, or used towels to an animal shelter. The college also ends up with anywhere from 60 to 100 abandoned bicycles each year, which are donated to organizations in Red Hook and Kingston.” Many donations also go to Bard’s Free-Use Store and Bard Food Pantry.
Post Date: 06-01-2022
Sustainability Events
- 10/01Sunday10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Montgomery Place Estate
Sunday, October 1, 2023
Walk/Hike
Montgomery Place Estate 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Long before there was online shopping, there were print catalogs; before the internet there were journals; before social media there were social circles; and before podcasts there were dinner parties. Meet some of the visitors and residents who made significant contributions to life at Montgomery Place while also shaping a wider worldview of their special field of interest. Highlighted personalities will include: A. J. Downing, landscape designer and founding journalist; A. J. Davis, architect and A-list invitee; Alexander Gilson, descendent of slaves, businessman, and groundbreaking gardener; Violetta White Delafield, scientist, pioneering mycologist, and outdoor wellness advocate. Walk will be postponed until October 8 only if heavy rain is forecast. Wear comfortable walking shoes and long pants. Difficulty: Moderate. Not suitable for children under age 7.