Do you like to eat and for yourself and your family to not go hungry? Then stop supporting activities that causes air pollution. It is a fact that air pollution lead to lower crop yields.

A common air pollution is nitrogen oxides (NOx), emitted from car exhaust and industrial emissions. NOx can cause direct damage to crops and indirect damage to crops as a precursor to ozone, also toxic to crops. While there are many kinds of NOx, for this study, researchers from Stanford University focused on nitrogen dioxide, which is the primary form of NOx as well as a good representative of measuring total NOx. Additionally, NOx is also easier to measure through satellite imaging. They compared the NOx findings to satellite greenness, estimation of crop yield from 2018 to 2020

From their results, the estimated that a 50% reduction in NOx can lead to improvements by 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China, 10% for winter and summer crops in Western Europe, and 8% for summer crops and 6% for winter crops in India.

“The actions you would take to reduce NOx, such as vehicle electrification, overlap closely with the types of energy transformations needed to slow climate change and improve local air quality for human health,” said author, Jennifer Burney. “The main take-home from this study is that the agricultural benefits of these actions could be really substantial, enough to help ease the challenge of feeding a growing population.”

So stop supporting policies and politicians who don’t support or with no clear plans to stop pollution and air emissions. Air pollution is bad for out health and decrease the amount of food for a population that has been overstretching their resource use.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

DB Lobell et al. Globally ubiquitous negative effects of nitrogen dioxide on crop growth. Science Advances. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abm9909