Pallavi Pant

Health Effects Institute

Air pollution poses a critical threat to human health with ambient and household air pollution identified as key health risks in India. While there are many studies investigating concentration, composition, and health effects of air pollution, investigators are only beginning to focus on estimating or measuring personal exposure. Further, the relev...

Ambient PM2.5 samples were collected at a high-traffic location (summer and winter 2013) and characterized for a large suite of elemental and organic markers. Concentrations were found to exceed the Indian PM2.5 air quality standard on several occasions, especially in the winter. Winter concentrations of several individual tracer species were sever...

Ambient particulate matter (PM) continues to be among the top environmental health concerns globally; in 2017, nearly 3 million deaths were attributed to exposure to PM2.5 around the world (HEI, 2019). While much attention is paid towards point and mobile sources of PM (e.g., power plants, vehicles), episodic/periodic events such as dust storms, us...

Air quality remains a significant environmental health challenge in India, and large sections of the population live in areas with poor ambient air quality. This article presents a summary of the regulatory monitoring landscape in India, and includes a discussion on measurement methods and other available government data on air pollution. Coarse pa...

Tourism can form an important component of a nation's GDP, and Vietnam is among the most visited countries in Southeast Asia. Most studies on personal exposure focus on the general population, or occupational cohorts with exposure to specific pollutants. However, short-term exposure to air pollutants while visiting regions with high levels of air p...

In Chhattisgarh, Raipur-Durg-Bhilai (RDB) tri-city area hosts the new administrative capital of the state, interconnected by an expressway forming the industrial corridor and is one of the largest steel manufacturing hubs in India. Between 1998 and 2016, the satellite and global model data derived concentrations show a 50% increase in the overall P...

PM2.5 concentrations were measured in residential indoor environment in slums of central India during 2012–2013. In addition, a suite of chemical components including metals (Al, K, Ca, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd, Pb, Mo, Se, Sb, Na, Mg, K and Hg), ions (Na+, Mg2+, K+, Ca2+, F−, Cl−, NH4 +, NO3 − and SO4 2−) and carbon (OC and EC) were a...

Personal exposure (PE) to air pollutants is driven by a combination of pollutant concentrations in indoor and outdoor environments, and time-activity pattern of individuals. The objectives of this study were to estimate personal exposure to PM2.5 and black carbon (BC), and assess the representability of ambient air quality monitoring stations to se...

Organic aerosol composition in the urban atmosphere is highly complex and strongly influenced by vehicular emissions which vary according to the make-up of the vehicle fleet. Normalized test measurements do not necessarily reflect real-world emission profiles and road tunnels are therefore ideal locations to characterise realistic traffic particle...

Road traffic is one of the key sources of particulate matter (PM) in urban areas, and an understanding of the chemical composition of traffic emissions is important for source apportionment analysis. In this study, PM samples were collected simultaneously in a road tunnel and at a background site in Birmingham (UK) and analysed for a suite of eleme...

Organic aerosol composition in the urban atmosphere is highly complex and strongly influenced by vehicular emissions which vary according to the make-up of the vehicle fleet. Normalized test measurements do not necessarily reflect real-world emission profiles and road tunnels are therefore ideal locations to characterise realistic traffic particle...

This article discusses how the perennial focus on policies to mitigate vehicular sources of air pollution in Delhi ignores a significant contribution by sectors other than transport. This works to the detriment of framing sustainable transport policies for the city. Such policies should not be dictated by the sole objective to reduce vehicular air...

Size distributions of particulate matter and twelve constituent elements were measured at a high traffic site in New Delhi, India during winter 2013. While PM was found to be trimodal, individual elements showed varying size distribution patterns. Three key types of size distributions were observed including unimodal with peaks either in the coarse...

ABSTRACT This paper describes results from a detailed source profile characterization study conducted in Raipur, India to prepare source profiles for traffic and dust-related sources. A companion paper has been published with results for a range of other combustion sources. PM2.5 samples were analyzed for mass, elements (Al, As, Ca, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu,...

Ambient PM2.5 samples were collected at a high-traffic location (summer and winter 2013) and characterized for a large suite of elemental and organic markers. Concentrations were found to exceed the Indian PM2.5 air quality standard on several occasions, especially in the winter. Winter concentrations of several individual tracer species were sever...

The global burden of disease study estimated 695,000 premature deaths in 2010 due to continued exposure to outdoor particulate matter and ozone pollution for India. By 2030, the expected growth in many of the sectors (industries, residential, transportation, power generation, and construction) will result in an increase in pollution related health...

Use of the Chemical Mass Balance (CMB) model for aerosol source apportionment requires the input of source profiles of chemical constituents. Such profiles derived from studies in North America are relatively abundant, but are very scarce from European studies. In particular, there is a lack of data from European road vehicles. This study reports r...

Road traffic is one of the main sources of particulate matter in the atmosphere. Despite its importance, there are significant challenges in quantitative evaluation of its contribution to airborne concentrations. This article first reviews the nature of the particle emissions from road vehicles including both exhaust and non-exhaust (abrasion and r...

India is used as a case study in reviewing the application of receptor models for source apportionment. India has high concentrations of airborne particulate matter, and the application of effective abatement measures is a high priority, and demands confidence in the results of source apportionment studies. The many studies conducted are reviewed,...

Purpose: REDD is being criticized on several fronts and thus, there is a need for an integrated, comprehensive paradigm that incorporates emissions reduction, biodiversity conservation, and community development, and is leveraged towards sustainability in forests and livelihoods rather than narrower goals such as emissions reduction or conservation...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to put forth a model for implementation of an environmental management system (EMS) in institutes of higher education in India. Design/methodology/approach The authors carried out initial environmental review (IER) and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis to identify the major enviro...

For any country, the forest policy is an important guideline to maintain forest resources and their interaction with other land uses. India devised its first National Forest Policy (NFP) back in 1894. There has been a paradigm shift from timber production to forest conservation followed by community-based agroforestry and social forestry bringing a...