Air Quality in Australia

Running Head: AIR QUALITY IN AUSTRALIA
Air quality in Australia
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AIR QUALITY IN AUSTRALIA 2
Air quality in Australia
Part one
Introduction
The environment plays a key role in the health and wellbeing of human beings and is also
a significant determinant of health. The environment offers our basic needs including fresh water
and clean air. Environmental health is used to describe the aspects of health which are linked to
the environment via psychological, social, chemical, biological and physical factors. A basic
feature of the environmental health indicators is that they offer information concerning a
scientifically based linkage between health and the environment. The indicators allow data
conversion to information by summarising the intricate association between health and
environment, as well as presenting them in a way that can be easily interpreted by the consumers
like the policy-makers (Gentry-Shields & Bartram, 2014). The designing of a good
environmental health indicator is a daunting task because they must meet numerous criteria to be
effective. More particular criteria state that environmental health indicators must offer a
meaningful and relevant summary of the circumstances of interest in a manner which meets the
end-user requirements. They must also be testable, transparent, sensitive to the actual or real
changes in the circumstances they measure as well as being scientifically sound. The
environmental health indicators must also use routinely gathered data and information as well as
be cost-effective to produce and apply. This descriptive study shows a key selected
environmental health issue in Australia. The study, indicators covers a host of factors of
environmental health using the Driving Forces-Pressures-State-Exposure-Effects-Actions
(DPSEEA) framework as established by the World Health Organization. The paper will critically
examine the air quality indicator using the DPSEEA framework.

AIR QUALITY IN AUSTRALIA 3
Background information
Air quality is a global issue which is also a critically significant aspect of environmental
health in Australia. In many urban regions around the world, especially in developing nations,
deteriorating air quality is a big environmental concern. It should be noted that poor air quality
affects the life of human beings as well as contributes to the degradation of the environment (PR
Newswire, 2019). Air pollution has been declared as one of the most causes of the international
burden of injury and disease. It is approximated that emissions from automobiles kill twice as
numerous individuals as care accidents. Moreover, there are increasing international awareness
on the adverse levels of outdoor and indoor air pollution coming from the use of biomass and
coal for heating as well as coking in the developing nations. in the urban areas of Australia, the
major sources of air pollutants entail wood smoke, automobile emissions, and industry. It should
be noted that bushfires are also other sources of pollution in certain parts of Australia. Exposure
to air pollutants and other particulates in the air has been linked to significant impacts of public
health and is presently tightly associated to a broad range of health outcomes entailing
respiratory diseases, fibrosis, cardiovascular diseases and emphysema.
For this paper, the following have been defined; Driving forces are described widely as
the social and economic activities which put pressure on the quality of the environment. For
instance, the Australian population has been exponentially growing while there has been an
increasing number of migrants over the past two decades. Pressures entail significant factors of
human habitation as well as the exploitation and use of the resources in the country. State of the
environment entail factors like the quality and availability of the natural resources, the degree of
the environmental pollution, in plants, water, soil and air, as well as the frequency of the
environmental hazards. Exposure occurs when individuals are exposed to natural or