Health Outcomes

• Multiple

Health Outcome List:

• Mortality (acute mortality, chronic mortality, infant mortality)
• Cancer outcomes (lung cancer)
• Cardiovascular outcomes (cerebrovascular hospital admissions, congestive heart failure)
• Neurological/cognitive outcomes (cerebrovascular hospital admissions)
• Respiratory outcomes (respiratory hospital admissions, asthma, chronic bronchitis, broncodilator use, cough, lower respiratory symptoms)

Environmental Agents

List of Environmental Agents:

• Air pollutants (ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO2), particulate matter (PM2.5/fine))

Source of Environmental Agents:

• Anthropogenic emissions

Economic Evaluation / Methods and Source

Type:

• Cost benefit analysis (CBA)

Cost Measures:

• Years of life lost
• Economic valuations provided by the EVA model for several measures of morbidity and mortality for 15 health effect / exposure agent combinations

Potential Cost Measures:

• Health impacts and costs of PM2.5 pollution based on the composition of the particles (e.g., amount of specific metals)
• Health impacts and costs based on dynamic differences in pollutant exposure related to individuals' behavior, gender, and other characteristics
• Health impacts and costs based on better assessments of organic aerosols and windblown and suspended dust
• Assessments that include chronic health impacts of O3 in addition to the acute effects in this study

Benefits Measures:

• Reduced number of premature deaths and associated costs attributable to a 20% reduction in domestic antropogenic emissions, and a 20% reduction in emissions from foreign sources (i.e., impacts of reductions of air pollution in Europe on U.S. population health)

Potential Benefits Measures:

• Not available

Location:

• United States and Europe

Models Used:

• Economic Valuation of Air Pollution (EVA) model

Models References:

• References cited in publication — EVA model (Brandt et al., 2013a,b)

Methods Used:

• The authors calculated impacts of air pollution on several parameters of human health and the associated external costs in Europe and the U.S. for the year 2010. Their secondary analysis measured premature deaths avoided by a 20% reduction in anthropogenic emissions. The authors performed three main phases of this large study —1) analyzed different chemical-transport modeling (CTM) methods that use emissions data to model pollutant concentration estimates in a gridded spatial format; 2) used those exposure estimates to calculate health impacts and related costs of exposure to O3, CO, SO2, and PM2.5 for the continental U.S. and Europe in 2010; and 3) calculated health impact reductions if emissions were reduced by 20%. For the first major step of this study, the authors participated in the third phase of the Air Quality Modelling Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII3) that brought together 14 European and American modeling groups to compare different CTM models. Among the 14 groups, researchers — 1) used emissions inventory emissions data for Europe and North America and different regional CTMs to calculate air pollution estimates for O3, CO, SO2, and PM2.5 on a gridded spatial scale in continental Europe and North America for 2010; 2) analyzed CTM model results, mean results, and uncertainty estimates for the different CTMs; and 3) compared modeled results with air monitoring data to confirm CTM results. For the second major part of this study, the authors — 1) applied the different CTM-modeled pollutant estimates with population data to calculate associated external costs using the Economic Valuation of Air Pollution (EVA) system for several health outcomes; 2) applied CTM multi-model ensemble results with population data to repeat EVA analysis for the same health outcomes. For the third major part of this study, the authors used EVA to — 1) calculate impacts of a reduction of 20% in global anthropogenic emissions as well as regional reductions in Europe, North America, and east Asia; and 2) calculate impacts of domestic and international reductions of air pollutants for each region.

Sources Used:

• Four major types of data sources — 1) Base level pollutant data — A) anthropogenic emissions data for Europe from the 2009 inventory of the Netherlands Organisation of Applied Scientific Research Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate; B) for regions not covered by the emission inventory, five modeling systems have complemented the standard inventory with the HTAPv2.2 datasets (Janssens-Maenhout et al., 2015); C) for the North American domain, the 2008 National Emission Inventory was used as the basis for the 2010 emissions, providing the inputs and datasets for processing with the SMOKE emissions processing system (Mason et al., 2007); D) for both continents, regional-scale emission inventories were embedded in the global-scale inventory (Janssens-Maenhout et al., 2015); 2) Surface pollutant observational data — A) ENSEMBLE system (http://ensemble.jrc.ec.europa.eu/); B) EU surface data provided by the European Monitoring and Evaluation programme (http://www.emep.int/) and Euorpean Air quality Database (http://acm.eionet.europa.eu/databases/airbase/); C) North American data from NAtChem (Canadian National Atmospheric Chemistry) database (http://www.ec.gc.ca/natchem/); 3) Population data — A) Europe’s population on a 1 km spatial resolution from Eurostat for 2011 (http://www.efgs.info); B) U.S. population data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2010; 4) EVA health data — A) Exposure-response functions (ERFs) for the different health effects and age groups used by the EVA system were derived from the literature with 13 references cited in Table 2; B) economic valuations provided by Brandt et al. (2013a); 5) additional sources cited in the publication

Economic Citation / Fundings

Citation:

• Im U, Brandt J, Geels C, Hansen KM, Christensen JH, Andersen MS, Solazzo E, Kioutsioukis I, Alyuz U, Balzarini A, Baro R, Bellasio R, Bianconi R, Bieser J, Colette A, Curci G, Farrow A, Flemming J, Fraser A, Jimenez-Guerrero P, Kitwiroon N, Liang CK, Nopmongcol U, Pirovano G, Pozzoli L, Prank M, Rose R, Sokhi R, Tuccella P, Unal A, Vivanco MG, West J, Yarwood G, Hogrefe C, Galmarini S. Assessment and economic valuation of air pollution impacts on human health over Europe and the United States as calculated by a multi-model ensemble in the framework of AQMEII3. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 2018. 18; 8.
• Pubmed
• DOI

NIEHS Funding:

• P30ES010126

Other Funding:

• European funding agencies including NordForsk’s Nordic Programme on Health and Welfare, H2020-LCE Research and Innovation Action, and the Danish Centre for Environment and Energy, EPA999999/Intramural EPA