Air Quality

Vision for the Air Quality Program

Our Air Quality program seeks to empower residents to reclaim their city from poor air quality and push for a greener, healthier future.

Launching in Fairfield, this program is split between two interconnected programs: the Youth Air Protectors and community-building. High school students will have the opportunity to learn more about the air quality issues in their neighborhoods and translate their experiences into community outreach and education. Sustainable Solano will work with these youth and facilitate conversations between local leaders to create practical solutions the community can adopt.

These two sides of the program will be mutually reinforcing: Student activists will provide education to inspire action among Fairfield’s residents, while community-building efforts will ensure that the needs of our affected neighborhoods are heard and that we find collaborative solutions to our degraded air quality. This community feedback will be used to inform students’ outreach efforts to empower more people to advocate for clean air.

Why Fairfield?

While it is easy to envision contaminants such as wildfire smoke or plumes emanating from industrial smokestacks polluting our air, many of the more banal and everyday threats to air quality go mostly unnoticed. Rush hour traffic along the I-80 and SR-12 has led to a significant increase in ground-level pollutants such as ozone and carbon monoxide in Fairfield. Both the visible and invisible air contaminants in the city have caused Fairfield’s residents and children to be considerably more vulnerable to lifelong illnesses such as asthma and cardiovascular disease. Air pollution can make it dangerous for children to play outside, increases your likelihood of developing chronic illnesses, and makes it harder to enjoy all that Fairfield has to offer. We, as a community, can still rally together to tackle air pollution head-on through programs such as this one.

Resources

Interested in learning more about the air quality and related health factors in your neighborhood? 

Let’s Make Fairfield a Walkable Forest

Let’s Make Fairfield a Walkable Forest

Sustainable Solano is looking to help grow an urban forest in central Fairfield, where we have identified a lack of walkable infrastructure and a desperate need for tree canopy cover. By shading our yards, sidewalks, and streets with tree cover, we can mitigate the impacts of urban heat islands, purify our polluted air, and make it more pleasant for our community to walk, bike and play outdoors more often.

Selected Neighborhoods

Through the Conversation Circles program, Sustainable Solano identified Central Solano neighborhoods for outreach based on pollution burden and population characteristics. (You can learn more about the Fairfield neighborhoods here and in the map above.)

For the Air Quality program, neighborhoods were also identified for engagement and projects due to an overall lack of tree cover/greenspace in urban areas and proximity to high-traffic motorways.

The Air Quality program is funded through the California Air Resources Board and is part of California Climate Investments, a statewide initiative that puts billions of Cap-and-Trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment — particularly in disadvantaged communities.

Banner image credit: Tony Webster/Flickr