#3 Dr. Christa Hasenkopf - Air Pollution: The Leading Health Threat - And How to Tackle It

This post provides the cleaned transcript for the episode with Dr. Christa Hasenkopf. It has (1) a general introduction and the (2) transcript.

1. Introduction

Air pollution is responsible for shortening global life expectancy by more than two years, making it the world’s leading threat to human health, ahead of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and even smoking. Yet it receives only a fraction of the funding and policy attention.

In this episode, Dr. Christa Hasenkopf breaks down why air pollution is such a silent but devastating force, especially in the Global South, and what can be done to fight it. From real-time data sharing in Mongolia to clean air markets in India, she explains how small interventions can catalyze big change.

Dr. Christa Hasenkopf is the Director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago.

We discuss:

• Why PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) is so harmful—and so under-recognized

• How Christa went from studying other planets to helping reduce pollution here on Earth

• The story behind founding OpenAQ, the world’s largest open air quality database

• How publicly accessible data changed the political narrative in places like Beijing and Ulaanbaatar

• EPIC’s Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) and how it connects pollution to life expectancy

• Why countries like Gambia are seeing rapid progress from low-cost, high-impact initiatives

• How philanthropy and global investment are often misaligned in this area with where the need is greatest

• The surprising success of India’s clean air market experiment—and its potential to scale

We also touch on the relationship between air pollution and climate change, how policy can bridge that gap, and why building local trust and capacity is key to long-term success.

This is a wide-ranging, hopeful, and data-driven conversation about one of the most overlooked issues in global health and climate.

🔗 Learn more about EPIC’s Clean Air Program:

https://epic.uchicago.edu/area-of-focus/clean-air-program/

https://aqfund.energyandpolicy.org

2. Transcript

Arvid Viaene: Welcome to the climate economics podcast with me, your host, Arvid Viaene. And today, we are focused on air pollution, an issue not just related to climate change, but deeply intertwined with it. Because both are driven by fossil fuel combustion, so progress on one often helps the other. But air pollution is more than just a climate co-benefit of reducing climate change. It is also the number one health threat to human health globally, causing more life-years lost than any other factor. And today I am caused by Dr. Christa Hasenkopf to discuss this topic.

Dr. Christa Hasenkopf is the Director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago, where she works to improve access to information and tools that help improve air quality. She co-founded and was the CEO of OpenAQ, the world’s largest open air quality data platform. She has held roles at the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. She holds a PhD in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences from the University of Colorado.

So, Christa, welcome to the podcast.

Christa Hasenkopf: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited for the conversation.

Arvid Viaene: Me too. And I'm very excited to talk about this topic because I think it doesn't get enough attention in the EU or the United States where it's mostly about climate change. But I think air pollution is just a really important problem. So I'm very happy to talk about this. Just to start, could you give an overview of how the harm arises from air pollution and how people are impacted. Because I think there are some statistics might really surprise people here in terms of what the impact is globally.

Christa Hasenkopf: Globally, we estimate with research we've done at EPIC that currently people are losing about two years of life expectancy due to air pollution and really just one specific type of air pollution, PM 2.5, which is essentially smoke. And that's more than AIDS, malaria combined. And so it's actually estimated that air pollution has the largest impact in terms of mortality and morbidity combined on public health, which is, I think, astounding. And then, depending on where you look across the world, it can be the number one driver of mortality, especially in countries in Asia and Africa.

And then to your question of how, essentially, I think we all know it doesn't feel good to breathe in pollution and we know it doesn't feel good on our lungs and it can cause respiratory issues and long-term things like lung cancer. But something a little bit harder to realize without actually having yeah research is that essentially air pollution, especially PM 2.5 particles, these very tiny particles, you breathe them in, they get throughout your entire so body and every single organ can be affected, but it can cause heart attacks, strokes, COPD, and really exacerbates any other issue in your body as well.

Arvid Viaene: Got it yeah thanks for that and I think that's just so if I if you said it's more than more life years lost globally than hiv and malaria combined.

Christa Hasenkopf: It is. And malnutrition, and I believe maternal and child health, it's comparable to smoking. Yeah.

Arvid Viaene: How did you get interested in the topic of air pollution?

Christa Hasenkopf: I first became interested as I was finishing up my PhD and I was working on issues outside of our planet in our solar system and doing research that frankly, I didn't couldn't quite see the value directly to human beings on this planet. And so I started asking myself, what could I do with my atmospheric science degree to have more of a direct impact on people? And I would attend all of these different seminars outside of my field at University of Colorado and happened to sit in on this ecologist who was talking about, honestly, things I don't remember at this point, 15-ish years ago. But I do remember him showing this picture

While he was travelling through Mongolia, and he was in the capital city just transiting through. He happened to show a picture from his hotel room for some reason. And there was a ton of black smoke. And I was I had no idea Mongolia, which, when I think of Mongolia, I think of open step, having a lot of pollution. And so talk to him a little bit about it afterwards. He's yes, the capital city has so much pollution. And so then I looked into it and it has a huge air pollution problem. There had been hardly any studies about it. The equipment that one would use to do something, to get it a basic characterisation with something was essentially the equipment I'd used during my PhD to do this very different research. And I thought, wow, I can actually do something useful with my skill set.

And so long story short, I went to Mongolia for two years, did a very basic study with colleagues at the National University of Mongolia to understand and characterize the pollution there. While doing that, realized something even more simple was needed, which was basic real-time air quality information on a daily basis of people and policy could be have a better sense of the air pollution problem there. And also, I will say, just living there and tasting the pollution on a daily basis, it just really drove home the air pollution as an issue and just how, to your point earlier, how under appreciated the issue is globally, yet what a big impact it has on lives. So that was my entryway into the air pollution world.

Arvid Viaene: And then how then did you take the step to founding this OpenAQ? Because you co-founded and then let this organization, how did that then come about?

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah, it started, the idea, the seed of the idea came from that work in Mongolia. And we'd actually seen that the U.S. State Department had launched at the Beijing embassies an air quality monitor that shared out air pollution. And it had this, it was around 2012, 2013, this outsized impact in terms of the attention that monitor got.

And really, there were third party app developers in Beijing who started accessing that information, putting this information in the hands of millions of Beijingers for the first time, who knew air pollution was a problem in Beijing, but it's different when you see on an hourly basis what it looks.

And so this caused a huge stir. And it was just this very, very simple project where they're measuring air quality and putting it out to the public. And so we thought, why not do that in Mongolia? It also had an outsized impact. And then realized all across the world, once I went to the State Department, that there was a lot of air pollution data, but not shared in a fully open way. So it'd be on a website somewhere, but no one could really access it. You couldn't make graphs with it. You couldn't do analysis with it. And so it seemed a really good idea for someone to do that. We tried for a bit to get other larger international organizations to do that. It seemed a natural thing. Instead, when that didn't work, we thought, well, let's build this project ourselves. And it started with just a couple countries at first, and we grew from there.

Arvid Viaene: I just wanted to then ask, so it seems the way you're saying it is that in Beijing or in Mongolia, people weren't aware of just how bad the air pollution was. And then once they got some information Then they became a lot more concerned. What was is that what happened there?

Christa Hasenkopf: I think very broadly, yes. But I will say too that nearly everyone knew both in both places that it's a problem, the larger issue. But I think having information that would appear and say, wow, this is what would happen in the Beijing case in particular. It was whoever at the State Department had programmed the information that goes went out to Twitter at the time, on an automatic basis. They never expected the air pollution to get above a certain level, so they had a jokey tag for the pollution levels when it got above this apocalyptic level, what it was called in the media. It was beyond index, and it had a very inflammatory phrase associated with it, and that made headlines, and I think that really got people's attention.

But I also think it was people having the app that pulled data that and saying, oh, wow, maybe I shouldn't go outside right now. Oh, wow, it's bad again. And then seeing it compared to various places, I think I think that was a big driver and gave it some immediacy. I've seen this study, by the way, this is a bit of a non sequitur, but I've seen this study for marathon runners. And it shows, you can actually see at the half-hour and the hour marks, when people are looking at their watches, they start hurrying up. And so you have this flood of people who finish right before the half-hour mark, right before the hour mark. And so I do think having real-time information changes the way we act and gives it some immediacy than it would otherwise.

Arvid Viaene: You also mentioned that it had an impact in Mongolia. What happened there? So you saw Beijing and then tried to do it there as well in real time?

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah, on a much smaller scale. So this is a tiny effort that I did with my colleague at the National University of Mongolia. We got some funding to put up a single monitor at the university. And then people at the time in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, really liked Facebook more so than Twitter. So we shared the data on Facebook. And this was an effort, I think it was less than $10,000 for what it cost. Dollars what it costs, but it caused a bit of a stir. National Geographic Mongolia began covering it. Students, student groups were talking about the issue with various other groups and spreading the word. My Mongolian colleague got invited to the parliament to talk about the role of air pollution and data. And prior to that, there was a lot of non-data-driven conversation about where air pollution came from in the city. And people would say it came from China. Now, China is thousands of kilometers away. There's a big desert in between. That's not what was happening.

But having that data made it so one had to reckon with the reality that pollution was coming from within the city itself. And so it changed the dynamic. And I think a lot of factors contributed to this, but I do think that effort contributed as well. But the Mongolian government expanded their air quality monitoring. They made their data more open. And it, I again, opened up a lot of conversations between, say, research and university groups working on the issue with the government about okay, what do we actually do instead of broadly waving hands and blaming China?

Arvid Viaene: Yeah. And I get the sense, as it comes, sometimes you should talk about, the lack of information to act upon. It just seems once you have this monitor in place, people can actually measure it. And the conversation becomes more quantitative, or more scientific, it's this much, this isn't good versus, well, we generally know it's bad.

Christa Hasenkopf: Absolutely. I think it gives it concreteness. I also think there's this human side of it and, effort we're doing now, which perhaps we'll dig into later at EPIC is, we're supporting these groups to measure air quality and shared data with the public in various countries. And in one of the countries and a couple of the countries, actually what we're seeing is the data is there, they're, they're making data exist where it didn't before they're engaging policymakers.

And it's almost, in addition to the data, it's this, there's there's there's a touch point, there's a trust being built between civil society and government to hey, that here is a go-to person or organization on air pollution. Now we can talk with them about policy. What should we do? We've never had a clean air standard before. How does that look? And so I think there's the data that sets the problem and gives some immediacy and perhaps builds some social and political will. And then I think there's also, the human linkage point that is actually, I think it goes underestimated. I think it's huge for governments to say, okay, I see the data's bad. Now what do I do about it? And who can I turn to do something about? Well, here's a group that exists and I can talk to them. So that's been something we've noticed as well.

Arvid Viaene: Is that then something you do as well?

Christa Hasenkopf: Mainly I'm referring to the group that we support.

Arvid Viaene: Got it.

Christa Hasenkopf: A government entity, for example, in Gambia, the government's been working with a group we've been supporting, a nonprofit we've been supporting, And that government group, a government entity, is now, they see that nonprofit we're supporting as the go-to air pollution experts in Gambia, because they are, they are, legit. But, otherwise, without them having, the nonprofit having launched this initially small data effort, eventually building ties with the government, the government wouldn't have necessarily had it on their radar.

Arvid Viaene: And one of the things you said, going back to the beginning, is trying to make it cheaper to measure emissions. Because, might just rephrase this question. So, because then you mentioned this fund that you have to promote emissions in different countries. How does it work? Because one of the statistics that I that I read that I was shocked by was the statistic that Europe, the US s and Canada contribute just 4.2% of the world's life years lost to air pollution yet receive 60% of philanthropic funds to fight it. Whereas Africa receives funding equivalent to the cost of a single family home in the United States. So it seems just a giant gap and in fund distribution relative to the problem.

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah, that as the total pie, which ends up being in philanthropic dollars devoted to air pollution is somewhere between 60 70 million total. Meanwhile, important, but less health harming issues HIV, AIDS, and malaria, and TB have a $5 billion dollars a year fund attached to them.

And there's no such fund that for air pollution. And so what we're doing at Epic is nowhere near a $5 billion fund. But the flip side of there being such a data resource scarcity for air pollution is that you can inject a small amount, relatively speaking, and have an outsized impact. At least that was our working assumption for this fund. And so basically we support organizations, they can be governments, they can be nonprofits, they can be for profits, they can be research entities in countries where we've done an analysis to see where there's the highest opportunity for a small effort, small sustained effort that measures air pollution and uses it for some national impact strategy could have the most impact.

Christa Hasenkopf: So, in this analysis, this was these are countries that have an air pollution problem, these are but they're countries that don't have many resources or in terms of data or philanthropic funding flowing through them as best as we can measure and also may not have a national air quality standards So these are not countries India or China or the US where to varying degrees have air pollution issues, obviously still, but data is not the bottleneck, for example. And so this is the places Cameroon or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where surprisingly enough, a 50 to 100K initiative, USD per year initiative can actually, and we're seeing this now, can actually have this national level impact.

Arvid Viaene: That's really that's a really huge. Maybe then an economics question, is the marginal benefit of additional funding still high? Say, if Bill Gates, which I imagine, has to be aware, or to some extent, what if Bill Gates gets involved and says, here's another 10 million, would the marginal benefit be very high? Or do you feel you've got good coverage at the moment?

Christa Hasenkopf: I think it'd be really high because what we're seeing is with these groups that we're supporting at the smaller level, this 50.000 to 100.000 USD per year-ish level, is they're kick-starting stuff, say policy conversations with governments. They're getting the appetite there. But then yeah, to do major national level air pollution solutions, or refitting industrial sources of pollution. So that you have scrubbers that reduce the pollution. These are major infrastructure investments. So our hope is that we're catalyzing some of that interest and we're also de-risking. So as I said, many of these countries have not received either very little or zero philanthropic investment. And so I think part of that's been fear of risk for, for say, funding from a philanthropic perspective. And so perhaps our goal was hopefully with this cohort to de-risk some of these locations and people then invest at higher level. Because I do think that's what it'll ultimately take. This is a great start. Now we need some major investment. That doesn't come from EPIC, but larger sources, Bill Gates, World Bank, larger donors of the world.

Arvid Viaene: Exactly when they're listening to this podcast they'll be aware and then we got to get you on their podcast so they become more aware so thanks so much for that maybe then maybe do we don't because we keep talking about life years lost. And at EPIC, you're developing the air quality life index, a measurement of the air quality. Could you talk a little bit more about how you measure that's that problem?

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah, so this is based on research by EPIC's director and environmental economist, Michael Greenstone and colleagues, who they conducted a study in China that was quite unique circumstances that essentially let them build this relationship between PM 2.5, this one type of pollution, the most health harmful pollution, and life expectancy. We take that relationship and essentially scale it across the world.

There are some caveats and estimates that go along with this, but it's a really great tool for estimating how much your life expectancy could improve if the air quality you breathe where you live met the WHO guideline or really any guideline. We have a tool online where you can adjust it to whatever guideline, whether it's a national standard or guideline of your choice. But essentially, this is how we estimate, for example, that the world is losing about two years of life expectancy. And also lets us say, for example, how much in Bangladesh and much of South Asia, people are losing about five years of life expectancy.

Arvid Viaene: Five years.

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah, yeah.

Arvid Viaene: Yeah.

Christa Hasenkopf: In Delhi, specifically at a finer geospatial resolution, we're losing even more years of life expectancy. So it allows us to do comparisons across the world. And what we do to, In addition to that relationship I mentioned, what we do to estimate this is we also use satellite-derived air pollution data that allows us to have global coverage. If we were using individual monitors, there's no coverage everywhere, but the great thing about satellite-derived information is you get an estimate across the whole

Arvid Viaene: It's essentially you exactly. So Michael Greenstone did the study and then you extrapolated to other regions based on the relationship he found there.

Christa Hasenkopf: That's right. Yep. Yeah

Arvid Viaene: One thing I think when you hear when I hear those numbers, five years is just so much. And because to meet the climate goals that we have of 1.5 Celsius, we would want China and India to contribute towards meeting that as much as possible. But at the same time, they're using losing five years currently due to air pollution. So in some sense, it seems to me the bigger priority there is to tackle the air pollution.

Then as a co-benefit, we'll reduce the CO2 emissions. That's, why in some sense, tackling air pollution is also tackling climate change. Would you agree with that?

Christa Hasenkopf: I do agree with that. I think of air pollution as the other side of the coin for climate change. There's some edge cases where this isn't quite true. But by and large, if you when you when you're having a plan to, whether it's for climate change or air pollution, if you just consider the two, you're going to get double the win. And I will say for a lot of the global south, air pollution, in terms of immediate economic impact, it's going to be much more larger than climate change, but very roughly speaking, for sure.

Arvid Viaene: Yeah.

Christa Hasenkopf: We're losing about, by the way, 5%, I think it's around 5% of global GDP to air pollution per year, which I think is a giant portion. And then that's very disproportionately towards the global south, because as you mentioned, about 96% of that health burden from air pollution, specifically PM 2.5 is felt not in the global north, but in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Arvid Viaene: I have a question then. When I hear these numbers, I'm man, it's a lot of life years lost. But then I think the one case where I've seen it is China did this war on air pollution. It started with this Beijing monitoring by the US embassy. People became very aware of the problem. And then China's, Prime Minister declared a war on air pollution. And since then, China's air pollution has been going down substantially. I feel that's a big win in terms of air pollution. I was wondering, do you see that happening soon for India and Bangladesh and Indonesia? Because for now, China is single handedly the cause of this air pollution going down globally.

Christa Hasenkopf: That's right. That's right. It is. And it's it's been stunning, about 40% reduction in the past 10ish years, which when we compare that to, say, for example, the U.S.'s progression, that's been much, much faster and shows what can happen.

In terms of how they did it, it to me, , it's a perfect example of air pollution. We know how, technically, we all do know how to solve the issue. It comes down to social and political will.

At that moment in 2013, there was an uproar, I guess, of political and social will. And it resulted in that declaring war on air pollution. It also meant this meant that the government put forward a lot of resources monetarily to do it, and also political will to enforce policies that were quite strict. So moving certain industries outside of cities or placing them strategically where they're not necessarily downwind of the of city and a population. It meant closing down certain coal-burning factories.

It meant pretty stringent policies that they then had enforcement mechanisms to see through. And it also meant a huge expansion of their monitoring to make sure this was what they're doing actually working. It also meant with that monitoring, the data was more open and so people could actually see what was happening. Now, whether this can happen in other places, I think I think some form of this is almost inevitable in most places. It's just a matter of when.

Of course, China operates at a different scale and speed than almost any other nation. But I do think there's lessons. And I think China I think there's lessons for smaller countries. I mentioned in Gambia where we're seeing this huge impact, certain countries can move very fast. A country China can. Actually, a lot of small countries can too, where there can be a lot of political and social will that builds up very quickly.

Now, resources can be an issue at the scale that China deployed them on. So I think this also is a question of whether the world and its finance mechanisms and philanthropy can act on it. Again, from the example we're seeing in Gambia, I would not be surprised if Gambia in five years has cut their pollution by 25 to 50%, given what I'm seeing going on there.

So I think it's it's a question of where to most strategically target the funds that do exist and how to build more funds in the system. Now, a in a country like India, that's harder. Data's not the bottleneck there. It's, I think what will figure, what will solve India's air pollution problems is going to be internal to India. I don't think the outside world's going to change that.

Arvid Viaene: Which then brings us to a different topic, which is India. Because India is one of the big challenges, of course. But then the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago has been involved with India in trying to combat air pollution. And so one of the topics on your side is clean air markets, which to economists, sounds like the right thing to do. Let's have markets for clean air. So could you maybe then talk about what's going on with clean air markets in India and how that's developing? Because I think it's also a really cool story.

Christa Hasenkopf: In 2019, UChicago partnered with a couple other groups, including J-PAL, Yale, and then government officials in Gujarat, India, to launch this first PM2.5 emission trading scheme.

This is based on other emission trading schemes have that have worked elsewhere in the U.S. And in and basically, they allowed plants to buy and sell permits for PM emissions to stay within a fixed limit. And then each plant could decide how much they could pollute and then they could sell. If they didn't pollute too much, they could sell.

On use permits. Very, very basic concept of there of an emission trading scheme. And But the thing is, this has been extremely successive successful. They've seen a 20% to 30% reduction in air pollution by and initiative by implementing this. It's been extremely successful. And I think an exciting question now for Epic is how and where this scales next. Where does it make the most sense to scale it, whether it's in India or elsewhere? Where could we be most effective? So I think it's been an incredible thing to watch that unfurl at EPIC.

Arvid Viaene: No, exactly. And a I think it's it's a really cool thing because it's in I get the sense that Gujarat itself is very happy with the results and they're let's yeah let's continue this work on this, which is really nice because, as an economist, , during my PhD, it's more oh, here's a model of the world and it works great. But then to do it in practice is a whole different thing. So I think that's really cool.

I also I should mention there is a video that is created on, I think, this clean air market by Epic, which I will post also in the notes to the podcast. I think it's an eight minute thing. I think it's quite well done. So I recommend people checking it out just to get better sense of what but went on there.

Arvid Viaene: So I get the sense that there's actually a lot of really good things being developed at the moment. Of course it should always go faster but is it right to be optimistic? Is there still a lot to be done and is it going fast enough?

Christa Hasenkopf: I'm definitely optimistic. I don't think we're moving fast enough or that there's enough resources in this space. But when it comes to our fund, I've been, and I'm I'm very optimistic about what we're doing with our fund by definition.

Arvid Viaene: Yeah.

Christa Hasenkopf: I've even been shocked at how fast things have progressed because, so we've been doing the fund for, we'll hit our one year mark in July. And we've had a couple of proto-awards a little bit before that. We have two groups, for example, that are already working. They've gone from somehow the data generation piece to sharing the data, to engaging the governments, to working with the governments to draft national air quality standards. I did not think that would take a few years, not at this pace. And I think it goes to show just how a little bit of injection in, in for example, the African continent.

I believe the number is 238,000 a year, that cost of the less than the cost of a house in the US that's invested on the African continent in terms of total global philanthropy devoted to air pollution. That's crazy, I think. And so, for our fund in its first year, and it's a modest fund, it's not a big fund, we've been able to almost 5X that in terms of investment. So, I'm very optimistic in the sense that if we can, as a broader air quality community, if we can simply get more attention to the issue, because I do think in this case, attention can translate into resources.

Arvid Viaene: Yeah.

Christa Hasenkopf: We have a really high potential for addressing air pollution in a lot of places that are going under the radar in the next five years even.

Arvid Viaene: I'm fully on board. With these air quality data, it seems it might not come about very fast or you can accelerate at least a lot more with some investment. Because it's just such a good way to also reduce air, CO2 emissions while tackling the thing they really care about, which is the air pollution.

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah and build the actual capacity to do any of that stuff, right, in the country. With people in the country, not from outside, which I think matters.

Arvid Viaene: Exactly. So, I'm just shocked that there's not more attention to this from philanthropies or I'm wondering why Bill Gates hasn't invested more money into this. I think that's my big question. Do you have any idea why that is?

Christa Hasenkopf: Yeah. So, look, I think it's a really good question to ask, and I don't think there is an adequate answer. I think some of the reasons that people haven't in the past is unlike, say, a disease, you can't just do it, measure shots in arms? It takes a bit more, it's a bit more complicated. And there's also. a bit of a removal between, say, a philanthropist and the actual outcome.

You have to take a bit of a leap in faith that a community, a government that you can't fully control we will have to do that. And so it's a little less direct and a little less measurable for that reason. And I do think that's partly I do think that's partly why I think air pollution also is an issue in general, given its invisibility. You don't necessarily see air pollution that harms you. You can when it's really bad. You can't necessarily see the impact it's causing you. You don't die of air pollution disease. I think these things don't help it either.

I think we're becoming smart enough. In aggregate, I'd to think that the case has been built and hopefully we will turn a corner. And it's a real it's a real opportunity for the right philanthropists or the right development agencies to see what they could accomplish, what good they could do in the world, on one of on the world's largest burden on human health. So that keeps me super hopeful about it.

Arvid Viaene: That's great. If, those philanthropists might be listening to this podcast, so where could they reach you or where can they find more about you and the work you're doing?

Christa Hasenkopf: The best place would be the Epic Air Quality Fund website, which will come up if you Google Epic AQ Fund or Epic Air Quality Fund at University Chicago. We have a bunch of information there, a map of where current awardees are, but also where we think the largest opportunities remain across the world that are not yet supported.

Arvid Viaene: Sounds great. And are you on social media? Can people follow you there? Is that possible?

Christa Hasenkopf: I'm on LinkedIn. So Epic is on Twitter and LinkedIn, and it's a great place to follow our work.

Arvid Viaene: Sounds great well thank you so much I found this is really helpful and I hope people come away with this of it's a really big challenge and it should just get more attention. So thank you so much.