Grant: Alliance Grants

There are major health and economic impacts of air pollution in Canada. Although air quality has improved in Canadian cities, it remains a large problem. Air quality in Canada costs for 2021 estimated by Health Canada suggest $114 billion in lost productivity nationwide (5.6% of GDP) with an associated 15 300 premature deaths. Pollution creates agricultural costs as well. Canada has a large agricultural sector ($49 billion in 2015; 2.6 % of GDP), which is reliant on fixed-nitrogen fertilizers that are external costs to farmers. Improved understanding of nitrogen losses to the atmosphere as reactive and greenhouse can help identify best practices for reducing nitrogen use and release from soils. In addition, volatility has been seen in the value of agricultural fertilizers with projected cost increases of >250 % for 2022, emphasizing the economic need to provide stability to the agricultural sector as supply chains recover from pandemic disruptions and the global community shifts to address the societal impacts of climate change. The project goals and anticipated outcomes from this proposal are a rare win-win-win scenario between the economy, environmental protection, and improving human health. This collaboration between Prof. VandenBoer at York University, Eosense Inc in Dartmouth, NS, and Picarro Inc in Santa Clara, CA will create a complete system of field-deployable chamber and multiplexing platforms to conduct pilot and intensive field observations with the first ever real-time simultaneous observations of an expansive nitrogenous gas suite (NO, NO2, HONO, NH3 and N2O) from a hotspot environmental surface for their release, agricultural soils. This partnership will independently validate the new commercial product, share findings at the world's biggest earth science meetings, and culminate in peer-reviewed publications to meet the exacting requirements of scientific and government research and monitoring communities in need of such new field tools.