Building a shared understanding of air pollution: A GIS-based StoryMaps tool of community-scale emission inventories for engaged and empowered decision-making

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Abhishek Dhiman, California Air Resources Board

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

In response to Assembly Bill 617 (C. Garcia, Chapter 136, Statutes of 2017), the California Air Resources Board (CARB) established the Community Air Protection Program to reduce exposure in communities most impacted by air pollution. Communities across the State are leading efforts to measure air pollution and develop strategies to reduce emissions in their neighborhood. To enable the communities to lead this charge, CARB and the local air districts collaboratively, with inputs from the community steering committees, develop community-scale emission inventories that form the foundation to assess current conditions, develop emission reduction strategies, and track progress.

For the past four years, our community emission inventories were available to the community members in a static and non-interactive format using PowerPoint presentations and conventional documentation (e.g., reports, charts, maps). While these are still very useful in delivering the necessary information, they are not best suited to promote community engagement, data transparency and accessibility, and participation in decision-making. We recognized an overwhelming need to develop and display technical data in a simple, interactive, transparent, accessible, and engaging manner to not only enable communication, but also to meaningfully partner in the shared purpose to solve problems. As a response, we are developing a GIS web-based story-telling tool that will present data seamlessly and with context in a visual manner.

CARB’s Community Emission Inventory StoryMaps tool is designed to provide a centralized location to display community-scale emission inventories of all air pollution sources in a community, and to serve as a platform for review and use of emission inventories between communities, air districts and CARB. The tool has an interactive feedback component allowing community members and stakeholders to provide input on air pollution issues in their community. Their valuable feedback and lived experiences enhance our understanding of local challenges and help improve existing data and emission estimation methods (e.g., identifying corridors of truck traffic and idling) to produce a representative inventory that can support identification and prioritization of reduction strategies. As an example, our presentation will focus on highlighting our work to characterize and visualize on-road mobile source emissions at a road link level, and the usefulness of such spatially-resolved and visual data to engage community members and stakeholders, promote data transparency and accessibility, further community capacity-building goals, and enable engaged, empowered, and shared decision-making.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Abhishek Dhiman is currently an Air Resources Engineer in the Area Source Improvement and Community Inventory Development Section of the Air Quality Planning and Science Division at CARB. Mr. Abhishek Dhiman is a transportation expert who works with advanced transportation models and emerging data to estimate transportation related emissions in California’s disadvantaged communities.

Jenny Melgo is an Air Pollution Specialist at CARB’s Area Source and Community Inventory Development Section in Air Quality Planning and Science Division. Ms. Jenny Melgo is CARB’s leading expert on spatial and location-based analysis and develops web-GIS tools to present and display air pollution data.

PRESENTATION FILE