Nia Dubon-Robinson is a Senior double majoring in Environmental Science and Sociology. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Conference Grant which she used to attend the Sustainability and Development Conference at the University of Michigan.
Participating in the SIRE program during my second year at Emory opened many doors for me. I was introduced to the various components of what it meant to be an undergraduate research assistant, which led me to working with my current advisor, Eri Saikawa, in the Environmental Science department. My research in Tibetan cookstoves and household air pollution while participating in the SIRE program, brushed only the surface of this growing topic in environmental health and sustainable development. I wanted to go more in depth with my past SIRE research and having spent the summer at the University of Michigan, I was aware of the international Sustainability and Development Conferencethat the university would host in November. Prior to the conference, I worked closely with graduate student, Wenlu Ye, who is also underneath my advisor. I was able to take her most recent analysis of the data collected from the agricultural and nomadic Tibetan villages and reanalyze the results.
Roughly 40% of the world’s population relies on biomass for daily cooking activities which are typically performed with devices known as cookstoves. The usage of these devices is usually seen in middle to low income countries, where mostly women and children are affected due to their domestic roles in the home. The common burning of solid fuels in cookstoves results in Household Air Pollution (HAP). HAP has been known to lead to premature deaths and growth of diseases where cookstove activity is common. During the usage of cookstoves different pollutants are being released such as particulate matter (PM). PM is a combination of extremely small particles and liquid droplets ranging from 10 to 2.5 and smaller micrometers in size. The smaller the PM the more dangerous it becomes, due to its increased chances of being inhaled and trapped in our lungs—eventually affecting our heart. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) standard levels of PM2.5in households is classified at 35 micrograms per cubic meter. From the reanalysis I was able to look more closely at the 24-hour PM concentration samples taken from fourteen agricultural villages and ten nomadic villages. I classified concentration levels exceeding the WHO PM2.5 standard level as a Peak and those households below the level as a Non-peak. In summary, from my results I was able to conclude that Nomadic villages were exposed to higher Peak concentration than Agricultural villages who had significantly less Peak exposure. When I presented my poster at the Sustainability and Development Conference I received a lot of constructive feedback from different participants across sustainable development fields. Some of the questions were, whether I considered the accessibility to certain amounts of biomass and if the spatial distance to the nearest forest was documented. Other questions were about the socioeconomic status between each village type and whether that could have an effect on the PM concentration of the household.
After my poster presentation I was set on attending the presentation session on Biomass and Household Energy Use. There I heard from researchers at Colby College that were mitigating HAP in Ethiopia by creating a fuel efficient cookstove specifically for cooking traditional ingera bread. They were documenting HAP health effects by measuring the height of children before certain age. Another researcher from the MSSwaminathan Research Foundation discussed the economic empowerment for women adopting clean cooking energy in India. He compared the motivation to adopt liquefied petroleum gas between men and women of households in rural and urban areas. Overall he believed that in order to prevent HAP health effects we must change the accessibility to cleaner cooking fuels than changing the engineering of cookstoves. These two different areas of research under the same discipline, showed me interdisciplinary approaches to sustainable development research and how often their conclusions may not agree with one another. I attended multiple other sessions ranging from topics discussing food security to women equality. The international perspective that conference participants were bringing allowed for engaging discussions after the sessions.
Before the conference I had a very vague idea about what sustainable development meant. But during the career panel of the conference the associate director of the Nature Conservancy described its meaning very concisely: “[Sustainable development is]… seeing a world where both people and nature thrive”
My advice for first-time conference participants is to do your research prior to going and highlight the individuals whose research is of interest to you. I would also suggest to not be afraid to ask questions after presentation sessions because most likely someone will be wondering the same thing. Lastly, I would say to not let the advanced academic environment intimidate you in any way—the other participants, no matter what discipline level, are also there to learn and better there research just like you.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Conference Grants.
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