While the ongoing armed conflict and political unrest in the Middle East is far from a good thing, it could be having an unexpectedly positive impact on air quality in the region, according to new research published last week in the journal Scientific Advances.
Dr. Jos Lelieveld from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, along with a team of colleagues from The Cyprus Institute, King Saud University, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology reported that data collected by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on the NASA Aura satellite found a dramatic decrease in pollutant levels in several countries.
For instance, pollutant levels in Syria and Iraq are down, and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) amounts in Damascus have dropped up to 50 percent since the start of the civil war there, BBC News said. A similar crisis-linked downward trend has also been observed recently in Egypt, Dr. Lelieveld told redOrbit via email Monday.
“Geopolitics and armed conflict in the region have drastically altered air pollution emissions,” he said, explaining that large changes of NO2 and silicon oxide have been observed since about 2010 – changes that “could not have been predicted,” and thus “disagree with emission scenarios that are used in the projections of air pollution and climate change for the future.”
Economic unrest, other factors also lead to lower emissions
In the study, Dr. Lelieveld and his colleagues report that while strong upward NO2 trends have been detected over parts of Asia and the Middle East, the political unrest and other factors in the war-torn Middle East have radically altered the region’s nitrogen oxides emissions landscape.
“The long-term space observations of NO2 and SO2 can be used to study air pollution emissions in the Middle East (and elsewhere), as they are related to fossil energy use and traffic,” he noted, adding that this data “can help monitor environmental control measures,” as well as “the impacts of economic development… international boycott, armed conflict and the related mass migration of people,” which is particularly important in places where local data is limited or lacking.
Often, nitrogen oxide emissions “are linked to energy use and CO2, but we find that these are not good predictors for trends in the Middle East,” Dr. Lelieveld told redOrbit. These compounds are “important because they catalyze the formation of ozone pollution,” he added, and NO2 and SO2 in particular play an important role in the formation of aerosol particles, which decrease overall air quality and can have a major impact on the planet’s climate.
Other findings of the research include: a drastic decrease in emissions in Athens, Greece due to the financial and economic instability of the region; decreasing air pollution in Israel and in Arab Gulf states attributed to environmental control measures; an increase in emissions in the Kurdish north and Shiite south in Iraq, but a decrease since 2010 in the central parts of the country taken over by ISIS, and a decline in Iran due to the extension of an international boycott.
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