Electric vehicles may improve a community’s health

I'm Dr. Anthony Lysowitz, and this is Climate Connections. Electric vehicles are widely promoted as a climate solution, but they can also be a public health solution, because unlike gas-powered cars, electric vehicles do not emit harmful tailpipe pollution. Erica Garcia of the University of Southern California was part of a team that studied the health benefits of transitioning to electric vehicles. The researchers looked at the rate of electric vehicle adoption across California by Zip Code, and compared that to hospital records. We found that within Zip Codes, over time, greater increases in the number of zero-mission vehicles was associated with lower rates of asthma emergency department visits. Garcia's colleague and co-author, Sandy Echel, says the impact was noticeable even though, during the study period, there were not many EVs on the road. Since we're just starting to make the switch, we're still quite early in the transition, and we only use data in our analyses from 2013 to 2019 because we wanted to avoid the pandemic years, and so we were surprised that we were able to actually start to link it with these health and potentially air pollution co-benefits. So the results had evidence that going electric not only benefits the climate, it can also help improve people's health. Climate Connections is produced by the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. To hear more stories like this, visit climateconnections.org.