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Assessing the PM2.5 impact of biomass combustion in megacity Dhaka, Bangladesh - PubMed (nih.gov)

This article is about crop burning in Dhaka, Bangladesh and attempts to figure out if there is more or less harmful PM2.5 particulate air pollution caused by either fossil fuels or biomass, and during which season is one or the other higher in the air pollution it produces. During monsoon season, fossil fuels lead in the most PM2.5 releases at 44.3%. When it is not monsoon season and is the winter season, the percentages are way higher for PM2.5 air particulate releases at 41.4% for the remainder of the year. Across the globe, there are now people stepping up to uncover the true and real environmental and health impacts this harmful particulate byproduct causes in different parts of the world and with differring weather conditions than what we see in North Carolina. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351209404_PM25_Emissions_from_…;

This study is set in South/Southeast Asia and uncovering that, when trying to count the percentages of PM2.5 put off during biomass, the true amount of emissions were being gravely undercalculated. Specifically rice straw burning becuase the amount burned varied so much because of different harvest and burning practices that it just wasn't taken into consideration. What this study does is go bottom up using these strategies: "subnational spatial database of rice-harvested area, region-specific fuel-loading factors, region, and burning-practice-specific emission and combustion factors, including literature-derived estimates of straw and stubble burned"(Lasko et al. 2021, 1). 

In this essay the authors have highlighted some of the stakeholders in the fight against industrial biomass operations as members of the surrounding community who live with these operations as close as their own backyards, and experience the environmental pollution directly everyday. They highlighted Belinda Joyner, a resident of Northhampton County, and an environmental activist who rose to defend her community and their lands and livelihoods due to expanding hazardous infrastructures such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Enviva power plant. Other stakeholders besides activists and organziers such as Belinda include the people of Northampton County who attend hearings with government officials and take a stance agaisnt pollution, as well as organizations such as the Dogwood Alliance. The county is predominantly Black and working class, one of several in North Carolina that bear the brunt of exploittion and pollution by powerful biomass manufacturers such as Drax and Enviva.

This timeline essay provides more examples from recent years of community responses and collective action for environmental justice.

The development of both pipelines and CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) in eastern NC have prompted action from justice organizations such as the North Carolina Environmnetal Justice Network (NCEJN). To address the ongoing problem of CAFOs, NCEJN has provided a number of resources on their site, as well as ways to take action by signing a petition to stop the use of hog waste as fertilizer. Prior to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) being canceled in 2020, NCEJN played a role in organizing protests and taking legal actions- in conjunction with many other community member and activist groups- against Dominion and Duke Energy, the companies responsible for the ACP's construction. 

I live in Glendale, CA. I completed by PhD at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education in 2020. I am interested in collaborative, visual, and experitmental research methods. My dissertation used youth participatory action research (YPAR) to examine children's health knowledge of the chronic illness and organ (heart) transplantation. I am interested in how COVID-19 impacts youth educational experiences and reinforces educational disparities. 

I can reached at ntanio[at]gmail[dot]com

I am especially interested in:

How are K-12 schools (primary and secondary schools) responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

How are universities responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support have they been given, what problems have emerged, and how are these problems being tracked and responded to?

I am a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am working on my doctoral dissertation that explores post-disaster ecological imaginary shaped and performed through data practices in post-Fukushima Japan. My project examines how data practices of citizen radiation detection activities construct and reconfigure the understanding and experience of citizen scientists regarding post-Fukushima “Japan” as part of the ecosystem.  For further projects, I am also interested in the sociocultural role of small data in the era of big data and how small data that represent and intervene in environmental issues are intersected and interacted with big data in various domains. 

I am currently participating in the Transnational Disaster STS COVID-19 project and the COVID-19 and Data group as a subgroup of the project above. As a member of these groups, I am unraveling COVID-19 data practices and the relationships among multiple data actors such as the government, research institutions, media, and citizen scientists in Japan. I am also interested in how differently citizen data platforms have been gaining scientific and political authorities in Japan, the U.S., and South Korea during the pandemic.

I am particularly interested in these questions: 

• What do different disciplines and communities involved in COVID-19 response mean by “good data”?

• How do local, national, and global data intersect, interact, and compete with each other? 

• What is shown and what is revealed or disregarded in COVID-19 data produced about different settings (a particular city, region, or country, for example)?

• How are COVID-19 GIS data integrated with other data forms? What is the role of the GIS data in different COVID-19 settings?

• What is the role of civic data as COVID-19 information in comparison to governmental or institutional data?

• What do people expect from data within the COVID-19 pandemic? 

• How is the data circulated for COVID-19 different from data produced in another pandemic period?

I can be contacted at inahk[at]uci.edu.

I am a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am currently in (or around) Austin, Texas conducting fieldwork for my dissertation on the science and politics of transitioning to renewable energy resources in Austin, Texas. I have helped design and undertake geographically dispersed and collaborative PECE projects that have investigated toxic subjects and places, transnational sts, and quotidian anthropocenes. I can be reached by email at jradams1@uci.edu.

I am also a part of the Energy in COVID-19 Research Group that is a thematic subgroup of the larger Transnational STS COVID-19 Project. In this group we focus on how energy consumption, services, production, and futures have been impacted by the current pandemic.

The transnational STS COVID-19 project also intersects with my work at the level of city-scale questions pertaining to how COVID-19 related policies and practices are impacting and influencing strategies and processes of political engagement.  Accordingly, out of the project-wide analytic, I have been focusing on the following questions:

How is ‘social distancing’ practiced and interpreted in different COVID-19 settings?

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

I would love to have the community that has come together around this project to collaborate on creating some resources that could be interesting to broader academic and non-academic communities. For example, it would be great to work together to create some timelines on the platform around various themes relevant to COVID-19, and to do critical readings toghether of key scientific or official documents using the annotation features.

Beyond creating the "products" themselves, I think we would get a lot out of exercise in terms of thinking together on these kinds of projects.