In the future it will be much more difficult to breathe, the plants will be to blame

Photo: Siwakorn TH / Shutterstock

In the next years it’s going to be much harder to breathery that is not only related to human activity and contamination, but also to emissions from plants and an increased presence of dust.

According to a study from the University of California-Riverside when the world temperature rises 4 degrees Celsius, harmful emissions from plants and dust will also increase up to 14% causing breathing difficulties.

Details of future air quality degradation from these natural sources have now been published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. About two thirds of future pollution is expected to come from plants.

Pollution by plants and dust

“All plants produce chemicals called volatile organic compounds biogenic (COVB). “The smell of freshly cut grass or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry are VOCs. Plants constantly emit them,” explains James Gomez, a UC Riverside doctoral student and lead author of the study.

By themselves, BOCVs are benign. However, once they react with oxygen, they produce organic aerosols. When inhaled, these aerosols can cause infant mortality and childhood asthma, as well as heart disease and lung cancer in adults.

There is two reasons plants increase VOC productionB: the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the increase in temperatures. Both factors are expected to continue to increase.

The second largest contributor to future air pollution is likely to be dust from the Sahara desert. “In our models, an increase in winds is expected to dump more dust into the atmosphere”says Robert Allen, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCR and co-author of the study.

As the climate warms, increased Saharan dust is likely to spread across the globe, with higher dust levels in Africa, the eastern US, and the Caribbean. Dust is likely to increase over North Africa, including the Sahel and the Sahara, due to the greater intensity of the West African monsoons.

The Organic aerosols and dust, as well as sea salt, black carbon, and sulfate, belong to a category of air pollutants known as PM2.5, because they have a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. The increase in naturally occurring PM2.5 pollution increased, in this study, in direct proportion to CO2 levels.

“The more we increase CO2, the more PM2.5 we see that enters the atmosphere, and the reverse is also true. The more we reduce, the better the air quality is,” says Gómez.

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