New Research Shows True Cost of Living with Great Salt Lake Dust
An interest in dust impact
New research suggests that dust storms coming from the shrinking Great Salt Lake are
costing the local economy millions of dollars every year, and the findings started
with an assistant professor’s one simple question.
Sitting at his office computer on the University of Utah campus, Dr. Albert Garcia scrolled through a spreadsheet filled with hundreds of data points in the entry boxes.
Looking over to a second monitor, he quickly typed up lines of code, running calculations on costs related to Great Salt Lake dust.
“I'm really interested—What are the impacts of dust exposure among the communities here in Utah?” he said.
Dr. Garcia is a University of Utah assistant professor with a shared appointment between the Department of Economics and School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability. His work examines the intersection of environment and economy, and in this most recent project he set out to understand the costs of the drying Great Salt Lake.
“We’re trying to translate the impacts of these dust emissions into something that is maybe more salient for policymakers,” he said.
The numbers on Dr. Garcia’s computer may be hard to decipher on the back end, but he pointed to the resulting charts and graphs that Garcia explained show a clear trend.
What he’s finding: The price Utahns pay to live next to the shrinking Great Salt Lake is substantial already and only expected to rise.
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