Clean air is an important precondition for human life and healthy ecosystems. The importance of clean air has been borne out by numerous studies over the years. Air pollution causes environmental degradation which contributes to acid rain, climate change, global warming and heat island effects which in turn creates adverse domino effects on human health.
Concern over the environment led to one of the most notable studies in 1971, when Maurice Song, the Secretary General of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, commissioned a report on the state of the planet. Entitled “Only One Earth”, the report summarised the findings of 152 leading experts from 58 countries for the first UN meeting on the environment.
In 2005, the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Environmental Sustainability again made a clarion call to address the drivers of air pollution. The task force highlighted this as one of the key strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals set out by the UN.
The key to addressing the problem of air pollution is an effective monitoring, legislation and enforcement regime. Effective compliance monitoring is necessary to detect and correct violations and to obtain evidence for enforcement purposes. It can also be used to gauge the effectiveness and progress of any air pollution programme. The value of the information generated however depends very much on the integrity and capability of the source. EMS (Environmental Monitoring System) is a low cost, low maintenance and self sustainable autonomous environmental monitoring robotic system that is able to provide high quality environmental data in real time. It is the first line of defense in the fight against air pollution.
The system was conceived and designed in consultation with the key agencies responsible for the implementation and enforcement of environmental policies in Singapore. These include the National Environmental Agency (NEA), the Pollution Control Department (PCD), the Meteorological Services Division as well as the Singapore Joint Civil Defence Force (SJCDF). EMS is able to monitor the environment and detect harmful/hazardous pollution autonomously. The environmental data, including video feeds, can then be sent back in real time to a remote base station for monitoring, analysis and possible enforcement. The system also allows for archival and subsequent retrieval of historical data to gauge the effectiveness of legislation and enforcement measures.
EMS is the first-of-its-kind system anywhere in the world, leveraging the power of imagination and the latest technologies to enable a more sustainable environment.