Speaker: Dorothy Lsoto
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
Talk Description
Air pollution causes an estimated 8.34 million premature deaths globally each year and remains the leading environmentally mediated driver of disease burden in low- and middle-income countries. In the United States, well-documented air-quality disparities are closely tied to economic, geographic, and racial inequities rooted in redlining. Colonialism produced similar segregationist policies across much of the world, yet research on environmental injustices remains heavily concentrated in the U.S., with far less attention to Africa. Much like in the U.S., the legacies of racist planning may shape modern air-quality patterns in formerly colonized African cities. Using an urban network of low-cost air-quality sensors, historical maps, machine-learning methods, and statistical tests, we show how British colonial planners in Kampala, Uganda designed racially segregated neighborhoods for Europeans, Asians, and Africans under colonial public-health guidance. We find significantly higher monthly PM2.5 concentrations in historically African settlements compared with European/Asian areas. Our findings demonstrate how colonial urban planning continues to produce environmental health inequalities today.
Speaker’s Bio
Dorothy Lsoto, originally from Kampala, Uganda, studied Environment Management at Makerere University and worked extensively in renewable energy technologies across Eastern Africa before moving to the United States for graduate school. She is now a PhD candidate in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Nelson Institute, where she also earned her master’s degree. Her community-engaged research, science communication, and policy work focus on how historical African city architectures shape air quality and public health, a dissertation supervised by Professor Jonathan Patz. Dorothy collaborates closely with communities, governments, global partners, and cultural institutions, leading efforts to install low-cost air quality sensors across Kampala’s informal settlements—including at the Kingdom of Buganda’s administrative and parliamentary site, the biggest and oldest Kingdom in Uganda, a major milestone for air monitoring. She is a contributing writer to the Kampala City Clean Air Action Plan and Uganda’s first national ambient air quality standards and regulations. A Next Gen Convergence Research Fellow with NSF NCAR, Dorothy is committed to fostering inclusive scientific spaces and mentoring the next generation of environmental leaders.
The event is free and open to the public.