Abstract
Today, slightly more than half of the world’s population live in urban areas, with Africa contributing approximately 13 percent of the current total world’s urban population. It is noted that urbanization has impacted negatively on the quality of the environment in the whole world. This chapter focuses on air quality and provides evidence of a constrained environment characterized by extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in African cities and its effects. To collect data, an extensive search for literature was reviewed. This yielded 152 publications, which were eventually reduced to 50 studies after satisfying a set of inclusion criteria. A detailed examination was thereafter conducted on all selected studies and findings on air quality were extracted and discussed. The literature review was limited to a small number of cities in Africa, particularly those with monitoring stations that provide real-time data on the quality of air in those cities.
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Busolo, W.S.W., Njabira, V.I. (2022). Air Quality. In: Khayesi, M., Wegulo, F.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Development Planning in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06089-2_12
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