After a summer of smoky skies, we need to address indoor air quality

The summer of 2023, now considered the hottest ever recorded, should energize U.S. lawmakers and policymakers across the political spectrum to take actions designed to ensure homes, offices and other buildings around the country are better equipped to handle extreme weather.

In particular, the blanket of smoke from Canadian wildfires, fed by high temperatures and unusually dry conditions, that descended across a large swath of the U.S. and forced people inside should serve as a compelling signal that building codes must be augmented to reflect new realities faced by millions of Americans.

Building codes are local regulations that guide the design, construction and modification of commercial buildings, residences and structures in any given jurisdiction. For several years now, codes have been upgraded, depending on the locality, to account for increasingly intense hurricanes and rising sea levels. This past summer demonstrated that they also need an update to mitigate poor air quality from wildfire smoke that penetrates inside.

“Summer 2023’s record-setting temperatures aren’t just a set of numbers — they result in dire real-world consequences,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson.

Those consequences include this past summer’s ubiquitous air quality alerts. At one point in late June, more than 120 million people, approximately one-third of the U.S. population, were suffering under air quality alerts from the wildfires. The alerts impacted more than a dozen states from the East Coast to the Midwest and some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, the end of the summer did not bring an end to the fires and poor air quality. Even now, some 300 wildfires continue burning out of control across Canada, with over 18 million hectares incinerated this year alone, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. 

But going inside doesn’t guarantee safety from pollutants. While buildings may have better air quality than the outside, the exposure to pollutants that penetrate from the outside over time can actually be much worse.

“We breathe much more air indoors,” says Joseph Allen, associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But since 90 percent of the breaths you take are inside, your total dose of outdoor air pollution could be five times higher from indoor breathing, which feels wildly incorrect at first glance.”

Except it isn’t. And it is hugely unhealthy.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences reports that both short-term and long-term exposure to indoor air pollution “can cause a range of health issues, including respiratory diseases, heart disease, cognitive deficits and cancer.” Perhaps as important, and as Allen’s research reveals, indoor air quality can have a significant impact on the ability to learn, work and heal, which should prompt employers, schools, healthcare providers and facility managers to assess the quality and performance of their buildings.

The Biden administration has taken a step with an initiative begun last year pushing states and localities “to adopt the latest, current building codes and standards, enabling communities to be more resilient to hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and other extreme weather events that are intensifying due to climate change.”

But because building codes are a local issue, the White House should look to incentivize adoption of better air quality guidelines for buildings that take into account wildfire pollutants, perhaps through a mechanism like its recently announced $400 million in grants to states and territories for adopting and implementing building energy codes.

Scientific American magazine recently opined that “as climate change amplifies hazards, state and local governments must prioritize updating their residential building codes to meet minimum safety standards.”

There is no more pervasive indoor safety issue that demands prioritization. Given that smoke from wildfires is a likely problem for years to come, more must be done to improve air quality in offices, schools, apartment buildings and homes — inside the buildings where most Americans spend the majority of their lives.

Mark A. Hershey is senior vice president at Armstrong World Industries and a member of the board of trustees of The National Building Museum.