EPA awards $8.5 million to 12 universities to study how climate change impacts air quality

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently awarded $8.5 million in grants to 12 universities throughout the country to further research the impacts that climate change has on our efforts to promote air quality.

The grants will be administered through the EPA’s Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, and will cover the effects of multiple results of climate change, like increased rates of wildfires and how their smoke will impact public health, how drought might increase incidences of dust storms, and how climate change is generating atmospheric changes in air pollution chemistry.

“The research funded by these grants will improve our understanding of how climate change is impacting our air and our health,” Thomas A. Burke, EPA science advisor and deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said. “By examining the relationship between air quality and climate change this research will help better protect human health and the environment.”

The EPA will provide funding to the following universities: the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Colorado, Boulder; Colorado State University; Columbia University; Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, which will receive two grants; Harvard University; the University of Maryland; the University of New Mexico; Washington State University and the University of Wyoming.