Community Impact Policy Institute

Protecting Children from Wildfire Smoke: Local Approaches to Improving Indoor Air Quality

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Recent severe smoke events demonstrate the scale and reach of wildfire smoke as a growing climate hazard and an increasingly national threat. One particularly vulnerable group is children. Because people spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, schools and childcare facilities can play a critical protective role, but many are not equipped to filter the fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke.

Indoor air quality (IAQ)—the condition of the air inside buildings, including concentrations of several pollutants that affect health—can deteriorate when wildfire smoke enters through windows, doors, and ventilation systems. As of 2020, as many as one in three public K-12 schools needed improvements to ventilation and related building systems. Although no comparable national assessment exists for childcare facilities, state infrastructure programs funded through temporary COVID-19 relief funds indicate similar widespread need within the sector.

Using childcare facilities as a case study, this paper examines how programs in Arizona, Oregon, and Massachusetts directed limited resources toward building improvements and what those efforts reveal about the support needed to achieve meaningful progress.

Reducing AI-Enabled Biological Risk in New York City

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology are making sophisticated biological work possible outside the universities, companies, and government laboratories whose biosafety systems have traditionally contained it. While the likelihood that this leads to the creation or modification of a dangerous pathogen is low, the consequences would be catastrophic. The national debate over whether and how to regulate AI is unlikely to be settled soon. This brief argues that New York City does not need to wait for the AI regulation debate to be resolved. The City can manage AI-associated biological risk with an approach similar to what it applied a decade ago to laboratory biosafety, without directly regulating AI developers or monitoring what people ask AI systems. In 2016 the Health Department did not know which high-containment research laboratories operated in the city or what they handled. The Board of Health required them to register and to report incidents, so that the Department could mitigate risks and plan its response before, rather than during or after, an incident. Keeping track of who is handling dangerous pathogens is something health departments have done for a century. This brief recommends three actions that extend the same approach to high-consequence biological work taking place outside traditional oversight.

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