Brazil has been dealing with massive criminal wildfires for the last few weeks, and the air quality is record-breakingly bad. Besides other obvious issues (ineffective government response in going after the criminals setting fires, climate change making everything worse), hardly anyone is talking about how to deal with the immediate air quality problem. It's a bit bizarre.
People aren't widely adopting PFF2 masks and air purifiers. These remain somewhat niche topics even though pretty much everyone is suffering. To be fair, there are occasional media reports and government alerts about how to deal with the situation, but these feel too little, and one only gets them if actively looking for them.
1. It's affecting tens of millions of people (scale ✓)
2. Barely anyone is really addressing it (neglectedness ✓)
3. We have simple solutions that could help a lot (tractability ✓)
It feels like there's potential for some serious impact if one approaches this right. It may be a severe case of availability bias, but all this is making me value air quality more as an EA cause area.