Air Pollution and Urban Health

A project at UZH for GEO 878 - Geovisualisation

Air pollution - the causes and its influence on health

Today, more people live in cities than ever before. According to the World Health Organization this urbanization trend will continue for the next few decades. Especially in developing countries more and more people move to cities in hopes to find a job and have a better life. And while cities have undoubtedly many advantages over rural areas, such as better and faster access to medical treatments as well as better education, they can also have their fair share of downsides, some of which even have negative effects on both the physical and psychological health of the inhabitants such as bad waste management, air and water pollution as well as noise exposure to name a few examples. All of these problems come with their own specific set of health issues and they are influenced by a number of different factors.

In this project, we focus specifically on air pollution and its associated diseases. Our goal with this web-map is to visualize possible causes and effects of global urban air pollution and make hypothesized dependencies visible.

Air pollution in BangkokAir pollution in Bangkok