Articles
How Clean is Our Air in KwaDukuza / iLembe? – A Preliminary 3 Year Trend Analysis
Summary Communities Against Pollution’s Citizen Science Project carried out a preliminary analysis to characterise the ambient air quality and establish an empirical baseline for the KwaDukuza / iLembe districts of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. These districts are home to more than 780,000 inhabitants and devoid of [...]
Is Air Pollution Our Societal Blind Spot?
Communities Against Pollution - Feb 2026. Air pollution now kills more people than tobacco. With decades of empirical evidence, it is globally acknowledged that air pollution causes illness, disease, leads to premature mortality, and in 2023, it accounted for 7.9 million deaths.[1] [2] In South [...]
Making Sense of Air Quality Indexes and Numbers
Article by CAP team June 2023 © When looking at your favourite air quality app you are usually shown an icon and a value from a scale that looks something like the image below. Have you ever wondered what it all means [...]
What is particulate matter PM2.5 and why you should be concerned?
Article by CAP team May 2023 © Most of us breathe automatically without giving it much thought. When it comes to food and water, we can typically tell when they are safe to consume or when they are contaminated, but when it comes to [...]
Air Pollution & Smoking – Part 3
Why worry about fatalities, injuries, and billions of Rand of environmental damage and medical bills, when there’s money to be made? The desperate and urgent need for economic growth and the lack of effective enforcement of environmental laws are causing massive levels of pollution, [...]
Air Pollution & Smoking – Part 2
What Analogies Can We Draw Between Air Pollution and Smoking? Understanding Cigarette Smoke When comparing cigarette smoking and air pollution, we must never underestimate the dangers that cigarette smoke poses to human health. There is no level of exposure to cigarette smoke that may [...]
Air Pollution & Smoking – Part 1
In October we will examine the question; Are we being condemned to becoming chronic smokers? Air pollution is probably one of the most serious environmental problems facing our society today. Mostly it is caused by human activities like refining, chemical manufacturing, mining, agriculture, transportation, [...]
Public Participation – Part 4
Making Promises At the heart of every public participation process is a promise to the public. This promise sets out what the public can expect from the organisation in terms of access to and potential influence on the decision. The promise also defines the [...]
Public Participation – Part 3
What are the conditions necessary for successful public participation? Meaningful public participation should bring interested and affected stakeholders together to work on constructive solutions to common problems. The process requires certain prerequisites to be successful: Structure and Process - There must be clearly defined [...]
Public Participation – Part 2
What are the benefits of public participation? Public participation must not be undertaken as a mere lip service or box ticking obligation. When public participation is carried out in a meaningful way, it leads to better outcomes and governance, and brings two key benefits: [...]