For the past four years, Smell Vancouver has used crowd-sourced data to better understand odours and air quality across Metro Vancouver while offering residents a way to report what they are smelling, how it’s irritating them and what they do to cope.
This month, the UBC-driven project published the first year of its findings to show how collecting odour data this way can help shape policies that manage air quality and pollution in a region with a population expected to expand to more than four million residents by 2050 and which includes known smelly activities such as landfills, meat processing and cannabis production.
“The fact is odours matter a lot. They are not just a nuisance. They affect property prices. They affect your quality of life, whether you can use your patio or not,” said Sahil Bhandari, Smell Vancouver’s lead researcher.
“So it’s a very important factor in decision-making on a day-to-day basis.”
Since 2020, Smell Vancouver has allowed users to anonymously report what they are smelling, how strong it is, what symptoms it’s causing, what they think is causing it, and ultimately, what actions they took to cope with it, such as closing a window or even ceasing activities to avoid the smell.
Smell Vancouver shares real-time odours residents are smelling and how they’re coping, including closing windows, using air purifiers and, in some drastic cases, moving away.
The information expands on what residents in Metro Vancouver can report to the regional government as an air quality complaint. Results are displayed in real-time, meaning anyone can see a current or historical snapshot of what is odorous and offensive and what action people take.
“What we’ve done is we’ve sort of gone beyond and are focusing on the human experience of odours,” said Bhandari.
The findings show that most often people closed a window and turned on air purifiers to deal with a bad smell. Others did what the study calls maladaptive behaviours, meaning they stopped an activity or went inside. A small percentage took steps to escape the smell with drastic action such as moving.
Bhandari hopes the project and its analysis can bolster traditional air quality monitoring governments do and “enrich understanding of the impacts of odorous emissions.”
For example, during the January 21 emissions incident from the Burnaby refinery during a restart, residents in the affected area experienced a burning, acrid, smoky smell. Smell Vancouver’s map showed dozens of reports almost immediately after the event transpired, as well as how the smell travelled across the region and how it made people feel.
The information came well before any advisory from the refinery itself or Metro Vancouver.
“This sort of highlights what this app can do,” said Bhandari.
‘On-the-ground observers’
Metro Vancouver, the regional government, receives up to four thousand complaints about air quality a year. Officials say they are paying attention to Smell Vancouver’s data.
“Many of us who work in technical subjects realize the value of having many on-the-ground observers being able to provide information,” said Julie Saxton, program manager of air quality regulation in Metro Vancouver.
“And that’s the level of data that we couldn’t possibly collect with our traditional instruments.”
Metro Vancouver is also working to use so-called citizen science in other ways to help with air quality. It’s incorporating data from commercially available sensors homeowners place on their properties that record air quality in that specific place.
It’s part of recognizing that the more data that can be collected about things like smells, the better governments can determine what harm they may be causing, what their source is, and what actions can be taken to reduce them.
One shortcoming identified in Smell Vancouver’s published findings was a lack of users from poorer or more vulnerable communities who may be disproportionately affected by smells or poor air quality.
Smell Vancouver asks for people’s gender, whether they can meet their needs financially, whether they have a chronic health condition and whether they are a visible minority.
Both Bhandari and Saxton want all residents across the region to make an effort to report what they are smelling to Smell Vancouver and the regional government so a more accurate “smellscape” of the region can be mapped and help shape air quality policies.