According to attendees at Stanford’s first-ever Forum on Sustainable and Healthy Buildings, clean and well-ventilated indoor air should be considered as essential to public health as clean water. From March 30 to April 1, the conference served as a rare cross-sector convention focused on advancing national indoor air quality (IAQ) by minimizing indoor pollutants.
Over two days, 24 stakeholders from institutions like the California Department of Public Health, U.S. Green Building Council and the International WELL Building Institute debated the most effective actions to implement IAQ guidelines that could soon be monitored in commercial and residential buildings.
Milana Trounce MBA ’08, an emergency medicine professor and a co-organizer of the forum, said that the forum emerged from more than a decade of personal teaching and engagement around pandemic preparedness. Trounce added that the COVID-19 pandemic, along with worsening wildfire smoke events in the western U.S., underscored the need to address air quality as an important public health intervention…