GreeenBlogs

Last year, I visited a friend in Kano, one of Nigeria’s fastest-growing cities. The air felt dry and dusty, but not particularly smoky or smoggy. I assumed, like many people do, that if I couldn’t see or smell pollution, the air couldn’t be that bad. But I was wrong. A groundbreaking 2025 study from The Lancet Planetary Health has made me—and many scientists—rethink what we know about air pollution. The study, by Chi Li and a global team of researchers, focused on PM1 pollution: ultrafine particles that are smaller than 1 micron in diameter. Unlike the more commonly monitored PM2.5, PM1 is small enough to penetrate not just your lungs, but your bloodstream and even your brain. This stuff isn’t just a lung problem—it’s a whole-body problem. And for cities like Kano, it may be the most overlooked environmental health threat we face today. PM1: The Invisible Danger To put this into perspective: A human hair is about 70 microns wide. PM2.5 (which most air monitors track) is 2.5 microns or ...

To end poverty, secure prosperity, and protect the environment while combating climate change and striving to preserve our oceans and forests, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were set in 2015 with the objective of achieving them by 2030 across both developing and developed countries.   Urban green space is a very successful sustainable technology that supports the most crucial SDGs, such as human health and wellness, life on land, tackling climate change, and creating sustainable cities and communities. Historically, greenspace has been used as two words, green and space, where the adjective green describes the space. For example, in a paper concerning trees mitigating air pollution, green space is defined as “land covered with some form of vegetation” (Warren, 1973). People are moving from rural to urban locations around the world in quest of better employment prospects, resources, and a more modernized lifestyle. Between 2000 and 2050, this stark demographic cha...