UNDP Donates Air Quality Monitoring Equipment to Belize

The Department of Environment also received air quality monitoring equipment today from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The equipment was officially handed over at the Belize City Center Parking Lot in Belmopan. Deputy Chief Environmental Officer, Edgar Eck says the donation will assist in gathering airtime information efficiently.  

Edgar Eck, Deputy Chief Environment: “First of all I want to thank the United Nations Development Program, UNDP, for the donation they have made in terms of the air quality monitoring equipment. Previously we used to use diffusion tubes which are not really air quality monitoring systems as such but those allowed us to build baseline information. With this equipment now this is a real air quality monitoring system and we will be able to get real time data 24-7 for carbon monoxide, ozone, PM 2.5. We have previous to this one we had another equipment that only did a few parameters like PM10 if I’m not mistaken. And so this will provide more information for us to be able to do more planning, to implement actions when it’s necessary because it’s providing us real-time information. Previously with the tubes we used to put it on the lamppost leave it there for a month then we have to ship it to the US for them to do the analysis which would take another month or so to come back another month. So by the time it reaches to us  it’s already like three months. And for us to use that information, for example, people would be already in hospital sick and stuff like that. With this equipment now we will have real-time information and we’ll be able to implement actions like I said immediately when we see that something is looking at the trends and see if there’s any spike on the different parameters that the equipment measures. And so that is real value for us. Like I said, this is the first one that we have with the different parameters that are necessary to monitor air quality. Our plan is that in the future we will have a network of systems within the country that will help us provide more information in different regions of the country and we will be able to implement actions accordingly.”