Arab Spring Brought Cleaner Air To The Middle East

What’s so special about nitrogen dioxide anyway? Iran had worldwide sanctions against them, which led to a sharp economic downturn and also a deep drop in air pollutants.

“We find that geopolitics and armed conflict in the Middle East have really drastically altered air pollution emissions”, said Prof Jos Lelieveld, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and lead author on the report.

Not all areas in the Middle East experienced a decline in air pollution levels, however. In contrast, pollution in countries that adopted many refugees rose significantly. However, the research is not exactly found to be good news with regards to climate change or human conflicts.

In Syria, where 200,000 people were killed in the revolution, NO2 emissions have dropped immensely. Nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide degrade the air and contribute to climate change, Lelieveld said. So the researchers thought the level of emissions there would provide a decent proxy of the economic activity in the region.

Scientists analyzed data that were measured by NASA’s Aura satellite since 2005 over several Mediterranean states and the Middle East and transmitted to earth every day. In the Middle East, there are no air quality networks on the ground.

“It is tragic that the negative trends we observe in nitrogen oxide emissions accompany humanitarian catastrophes”, he said.

This is particularly evident in Syria. According to information from the United Nations more than 11 million Syrians have fled their homes.

Looking at levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that are generated from the burning of fossil fuels especially in transport, the team found a complex and unpredictable picture.

Cities seeing probably the most change tended to be in areas of extreme upheaval, the staff notes, resembling these in Iraq and Syria, the place civil warfare and insurgencies have pushed down financial output, and lessened the quantity of driving in automobiles and use of electrical energy. In Kerbala, a city south of Baghdad predominantly inhabited by Shiites, it even rose by about ten percent per year.

But in Iraq, the rise of so-called Islamic State can also be clearly seen in the air quality data. Emissions have also dropped off in Baghdad, which has weathered a series of deadly attacks but remained out of the hands of Islamic State.

However, sanctions played a role in decreased emissions in Iran.

Expanding over the scope of their study, the German researchers also looked at possibly the hardest hit country by the economic crash of 2008, Greece. Over Athens they dropped by 40 percent since 2008.

It is no surprise that nitrogen oxide emissions are changing with the economic performance of many countries. From the mid-1990s onward, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) has been monitored from area, and since 2004 with comparatively excessive spatial decision by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument.

Air pollution is partly influenced by the levels of nitrogen oxides (NO2) in the atmosphere, which are emitted by fossil fuels and other environmental events that involve combustion.

The researchers believe that the drastic decrease of the air pollutant seen across the Middle East has important lessons for projections of global emissions.