Air Quality Matters

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters and One Take, where we unpack the latest research shaping our understanding of indoor air and the built environment.

This week, we step away from the physics and chemistry of air quality and dive firmly into the psychology of how we perceive—and crucially, misperceive—the air around us.

The paper is titled Why Do We Misperceive Air Pollution? A Scoping Review of Key Judgmental Biases, published in Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, and it systematically dismantles a dangerous assumption many of us hold: that if we just give people the data—the graph, the PM2.5 reading, the red light on a sensor—they'll change their behaviour.

The Central Question

Why do we struggle so much to communicate the risk of poor air quality, particularly in our homes? And why do technical solutions—ventilation systems, sensors, standards—so often fail to deliver the health outcomes we expect?

The answer, this paper argues, is that our brains are essentially wired to misinterpret or even ignore the quality of the air we breathe, regardless of the facts. Information does not equal action. Perception is not reality—but for the person living in that home, perception is their reality.

The Six Psychological Biases That Blind Us to Air Pollution

The Big Takeaway:

Our current approach to communication—largely based on "deficit models" (the idea that people just lack information)—is fundamentally flawed. We can't just put a sensor in a room, point to the red light, and expect people to behave differently. These biases are working in the background to minimize that signal.

If someone has a home halo effect, they'll look at the red light and think the sensor is broken, rather than their air is toxic.

To be effective—whether as engineers, consultants, housing officers, or policymakers—we need to stop treating occupants like passive recipients of data. We need to understand the social and psychological context they live in. We need to acknowledge emotional connections, offer alternatives that provide the same sense of comfort without the emissions, and recognize that unless we bridge the gap between technical reality and lived perception, all the ventilation systems in the world won't deliver the health outcomes we want.

The technical solution is only half the battle. The messy, biased, emotional human element is where the real challenge lies.

This is Part One of a five-part series exploring the psychology and perception of risk around air quality and ventilation.

Why do we misperceive air pollution? A scoping review of key judgmental biases

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-024-01650-y

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Psychology of Air Perception
00:01:19 The Assumption We All Make: Data Equals Action
00:02:33 Sensory Capacity: When Our Senses Fail Us
00:03:10 Habituation: The Nose Blindness Phenomenon
00:03:54 The Home Halo Effect: My Sanctuary Can't Be Toxic
00:05:07 Confirmation Bias: Pollution Happens to Someone Else
00:05:44 The Exclusion Effect: Bigger Problems Crowd Out Air Quality
00:06:29 The Affect Heuristic: Emotion Over Evidence
00:07:33 The So What: Rethinking Communication and Engagement
00:09:29 The Big Takeaway: Perception is Their Reality
00:10:15 Closing: Part One of Five on Psychology and Risk Perception

We sit down with John O'Connor, former chair of Ireland's Housing Commission, and Neil Freshwater, Public Affairs Manager for GB and Ireland at Velux, to explore one of the most complex challenges facing Ireland and Europe today: how do we deliver affordable housing at pace while ensuring homes are healthy, sustainable, and fit for purpose?

Recorded at a Healthy Homes Ireland event in Dublin just before Christmas, this conversation tackles the fundamental tensions in housing policy—between volume and quality, affordability and performance, political cycles and long-term planning. With Ireland's new housing plan published, the European Commission preparing its first-ever affordable housing plan, and the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive due to be transposed into Irish law by May 2026, the stakes have never been higher.

The Central Question

We've understood for over a century that housing and health are inseparable. Yet somehow, in our rush to solve the housing crisis, we've fragmented that relationship. How do we get back to first principles? How do we ensure that every home—not just the expensive ones—delivers good air quality, daylight, thermal comfort, and the conditions for families to thrive?

Key Topics Discussed:

The Housing Commission's Vision: Why Ireland's housing crisis isn't just about numbers—it's about creating a cohesive society where having a home is a fundamental right, not a luxury. The Commission's recommendations as a long-term, interconnected menu—not a pick-and-mix.

The Forgotten Link Between Health and Housing: How ventilation and daylighting were central to 19th and early 20th-century housing standards—and why we've lost that focus in modern construction. The sobering reality that people John knows are now suffering terminal illnesses due to poor indoor air quality.

Fast, Cheap, and Good—Pick Any Two: The political and economic pressures driving volume over quality. Why "any shelter is better than no shelter" is a dangerous narrative—and how 5,000 children experiencing homelessness in Ireland today (compared to fewer than 100 a decade ago) lays bare the human cost of failure.

The One-Dimensional Trap: How the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive initially focused only on energy efficiency—and why the inclusion of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in the revised directive is a game-changer, if we can translate it into policy and practice.

Because at the end of the day, it's not about units. It's about homes. And homes are for people.

HOST:

Simon Jones: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-air-quality-matters/

GUESTS:

John O'Connor - Former Chair, Housing Commission, Ireland

Neil Freshwater - Public Affairs Manager, Velux GB & Ireland

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Farmwood - Eurovent - Aico

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here. Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: Housing, Health, and the Irish Context
00:02:56 Meet the Guests: John O'Connor and the Housing Commission
00:04:39 The Housing Crisis: Numbers, Demographics, and the Meaning of Home
00:09:25 Neil Freshwater: Velux's Origins in Healthy Buildings
00:16:25 The Trifecta Challenge: Fast, Cheap, and Good
00:17:52 The Forgotten Science: Air Quality and Ventilation in Housing
00:21:04 Daylight Inequality and the Quality Divide
00:45:56 The Monitoring Revolution: From Code Compliance to Performance
00:53:03 The Skills and Labour Crisis: Building at Lightning Pace
01:02:41 Modern Methods of Construction: Promise and Reality
01:05:01 Looking Forward: Ireland's EU Presidency and the Path Ahead
01:11:14 Closing: The Charter for Healthy Homes

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters and One Take, where we unpack the latest research shaping our understanding of indoor air and the built environment.

This week, we're diving into one of the most complex and urgent environmental dilemmas of our time: the smoke from fires we set on purpose.

The paper, Associations between PM2.5 from Prescribed Burning and Emergency Department Visits in 11 Southeastern US States by a team of researchers from Boston University, Georgia Tech, and other institutions, tackles a critical question: In our effort to prevent catastrophic wildfires through prescribed burning, are we creating a different, more chronic health problem from the smoke of these "good fires"?

The Environmental Dilemma:

Prescribed burning—intentionally setting smaller, controlled fires to clear underbrush—is one of our primary tools to fight the catastrophic wildfires made worse by climate change. But this tool has side effects: smoke containing fine particulate matter (PM2.5). The question is whether we're trading one health disaster for another.

The Study:

Researchers analyzed over 30 million emergency department visits from 11 southeastern US states over nearly a decade—a region where prescribed burning is common practice. Using sophisticated chemical transport models, they "tagged" PM2.5 in the air to identify which portions came specifically from prescribed fires, allowing them to isolate the health signal of just these controlled burns.

The Surprising Findings:

Yes, there is a link. On days with high levels of PM2.5 from prescribed fires, there was a statistically significant increase in emergency department visits for upper respiratory infections and, most notably, ischemic heart disease, which went up by about 6%.

But here's the counter-intuitive part: For the classic signatures of smoke exposure—overall respiratory admissions, asthma, and COPD—they didn't find a statistically significant increase. This is what makes smoke from prescribed fires different from wildfire smoke.

Why the Difference?

The nature of the fires themselves. Wildfires are hot, intense, and chaotic, burning everything from the forest floor to the canopy. Prescribed burns are cooler and slower, designed to smolder through underbrush, grass, and leaf litter. This difference in what's burning and how it's burning creates a different chemical cocktail of smoke. Prescribed fire smoke tends to have lower concentrations of pollutants like carbon monoxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) compared to wildfire smoke.

The Big Takeaway:

Not all smoke is created equal. The health impact of PM2.5 is not just about the mass of particles in the air—it's about what those particles are made of, and it depends profoundly on the source.

This research doesn't give us an easy answer. It doesn't say prescribed burning is safe or unsafe. Instead, it gives us a much more nuanced picture. It's a powerful reminder that there are no easy wins in environmental management—it's all a game of trade-offs. We're using a tool to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, but that tool has its own health risks, and those risks are different.

This kind of research is absolutely vital for land managers and public health officials because it helps them understand the specific health impacts of their decisions, allowing for more targeted warnings and a better, more honest conversation about the risks we're actually choosing to manage.

Associations between PM2.5 from prescribed burning and emergency department visits in 11 Southeastern US states

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2025.109770

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Prescribed Burning Paradox
00:01:48 The Study Design: Tagging Smoke from Good Fires
00:02:54 The Findings: A Surprising Health Signal
00:04:02 Not All Smoke is Equal: The Chemistry Matters
00:05:32 The Big Takeaway: Environmental Trade-Offs and Honest Conversations
00:06:40 Closing: Thanks and Next Week

In this essential episode, we sit down with Paul O'Sullivan, lecturer in Sustainable Energy Engineering at MTU and co-lead of the MESO Research Group, to explore one of the most pressing—yet often overlooked—challenges in our built environment: how do we design buildings that don't overheat?

Paul brings deep expertise in low-energy demand-side technologies, building retrofit strategies, indoor thermal environments, and ventilative cooling. His work sits at the fascinating intersection of thermal comfort, air quality, decarbonization, and the future resilience of our homes, schools, and workplaces.

The Central Question

We've spent decades designing buildings to be thermally comfortable in winter—airtight, well-insulated, energy-efficient. But in doing so, have we created a new problem? As our climate warms and our buildings become better at keeping heat in, how do we ensure they can also let heat out when they need to—without resorting to energy-intensive air conditioning?

Key Topics Discussed:

Thermal Comfort vs. Overheating: What's the difference between discomfort and a genuine health risk? Why overheating is not just about temperature, but about duration, vulnerability, and the capacity of a building to respond.

The Unintended Consequences of Energy Efficiency: How our drive to decarbonize heating has created buildings that struggle to cool—and why Ireland's cooling season now starts in March.

The Cooling Ladder: A design philosophy for tackling overheating—starting with prevention (solar shading, orientation), then modulation (thermal mass, phase-change materials), then dissipation (ventilative cooling), and only finally, supplementary mechanical cooling.

Ventilative Cooling and the New CEN Technical Specification: How natural and mechanical ventilation can provide free, sustainable cooling—and why the European standard Paul helped develop is a game-changer for designers.

The Performance Gap: Why buildings that look great on paper often overheat in reality—and why simulation tools are struggling to keep pace with the rate of climate change and building innovation.

Agency and Adaptation: The power of openable windows, external shutters, and giving occupants control. Why buildings that allow people to adapt perform better—and why we've lost some of that agency in modern construction.

This is a conversation about trade-offs, resilience, and the path forward. It's about recognizing that comfort isn't a luxury—it's a fundamental aspect of health, well-being, and productivity. And it's about designing buildings that work with their climate, not against it.

DESCRIPTION:

HOST:

Simon Jones: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-air-quality-matters/

GUEST:

 Paul O’Sullivan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-d-o-sullivan-441b9023/

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Zehnder Group -  Farmwood - Eurovent- Aico - Aereco - Ultra Protect - 

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here. Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: Paul O'Sullivan and the Science of Thermal Comfort
00:02:18 Thermal Comfort vs Air Quality: Different Lenses on Indoor Environment
00:04:07 Maslow's Hierarchy: Is Comfort a Luxury or a Necessity?
00:05:34 The Decarbonization Dilemma: Energy Efficiency vs Thermal Comfort
00:09:31 Expectation and Adaptation: The Psychology of Thermal Experience
00:14:29 The Cooling Ladder: A Design Philosophy for Passive Solutions
00:15:44 Where Are We With the Science? Progress and Gaps in Thermal Comfort
00:24:07 Defining Overheating: From Discomfort to Health Risk
00:24:15 The Measurement Challenge: 20 Different Ways to Assess Overheating
00:27:52 Conditioned vs Free-Floating: Two Different Overheating Problems
00:37:09 Ireland's Paradox: Overheating in a Cool Climate
00:37:16 The Building as Battery: Thermal Mass and Night Cooling Strategies
00:52:55 The Performance Gap: Why Simulations Don't Match Reality
01:00:40 The Data Desert: Why We Don't Know How Our Buildings Perform
01:20:50 Behavior and Technology: The Human Element in Building Performance
00:49:07 Ventilation's Role: Free Cooling Potential and Air Quality Trade-offs
00:56:08 Heat Recovery Dilemma: Winter Efficiency vs Summer Cooling Needs
01:10:20 Hybrid Solutions: The Future of Resilient Cooling
01:40:55 Climate Shelters: Schools as Community Heat Wave Refuges
01:43:36 Double Jeopardy: When Heat Waves Meet Power Outages and Poor Air Quality
01:26:51 The MESO Research Group: From Ventilative Cooling to Citizen Science
01:29:44 Window Aerodynamics: The Forgotten Performance Metric
01:34:55 European Standards: Translating Research into Design Tools
01:48:26 Citizen Science: Engaging Occupants in Building Performance Research
01:51:30 The Path Forward: Data, Standards, and Human-Centered Design

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters and One Take, where we unpack the latest research shaping our understanding of indoor air and the built environment.

This week, we're diving into a paper that tackles a question millions of us have been living with since the pandemic: What actually makes a good home office?

The study is titled Home as an Office: Investigating the Associations Between Indoor Environmental Quality, Wellbeing and Performance in Work From Home Settings, and it explores a fascinating tension—between what sensors objectively measure and what people subjectively experience.

The Setup:

Researchers recruited 95 people working from home in Vancouver and Seattle and used a clever two-pronged approach. On one hand, participants were given desktop monitors that objectively measured PM2.5, total VOCs, CO₂, temperature, humidity, and sound levels—the hard numbers on the physical environment. On the other hand, they conducted detailed questionnaires asking people about their perceptions: Are you satisfied with the lighting? Do you have an ergonomic chair? Does noise from family interrupt you? They also measured outcomes using standardized surveys for psychological wellbeing, physical symptoms, and work performance.

The Core Question:

Which is the better predictor of wellbeing and productivity—the objective data from the sensors, or the subjective feelings of the occupants?

The Surprising Finding:

The data from the objective sensors—the actual measured levels of PM2.5, CO₂, and so on—showed predominantly weaker associations with how people felt or how productive they were. Even if CO₂ levels were a bit high or PM2.5 was slightly elevated, in this study it didn't have a strong direct link to reported wellbeing or performance.

Why? The authors suggest that indoor environmental quality in most homes was generally moderate, but more importantly, people have agency at home. If you're cold, you can change the thermostat. If the air feels stuffy, you can open a window. This ability to control and adapt seems to weaken the direct link between what a sensor measures and how people actually feel.

The Perception-Based Data Tells a Different Story:

When researchers looked at subjective perception, they found much stronger connections. Satisfaction with ergonomic furniture, good daylight, and a pleasant workspace aesthetic were all strongly linked to positive wellbeing and performance outcomes. People who felt good about their physical setup felt better and worked better.

The reverse was also true. Problems like unwanted interruptions from family, noise from the street, or even persistent kitchen odors were strongly associated with lower psychological wellbeing, reduced vitality, and depressed mood.

The Big Takeaway:

The paper's core message is not that objective indoor air quality doesn't matter—of course it does, especially at extreme levels. But in the context of working from home, our subjective experience of the space is a much better predictor of our wellbeing and performance than what a sensor might tell us.

Perception really is reality here. The feeling of being in control, having a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing space, and not being constantly interrupted—these are not just fluffy nice-to-haves. The study shows they have measurable, statistically significant associations with our mental health and productivity.

The Implications:

This challenges a purely engineering-led, sensor-driven approach to creating healthy buildings. It tells us we can't just focus on hitting certain parts per million. We need a more holistic, human-centered approach. When we design spaces for home working—or frankly, any space—we need to think just as much about ergonomics, acoustics, privacy, and personal control as we do about ventilation rates.

Home as an office: Investigating the associations between indoor environmental quality, well-being, and performance in work-from-home settings

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113310

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces and Inbiot

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Home Office Question We've All Been Asking
00:01:35 The Study Design: Measuring Both Objective and Subjective Reality
00:02:55 The Surprising Finding: Sensors Don't Tell the Whole Story
00:03:32 The Agency Factor: Why Home is Different from the Office
00:04:05 Perception is Reality: The Power of Subjective Experience
00:04:41 The Problems That Matter: Interruptions, Noise, and Kitchen Odors
00:05:07 The Big Takeaway: Beyond Parts Per Million
00:05:53 Implications: A Human-Centered Approach to Indoor Spaces
00:06:40 The Validation: Your Uncomfortable Chair Really Does Matter
00:07:07 Closing: Thanks and Next Week