"What We Breathe Impacts Our Health: Improving Understanding of the Link between Air Pollution and Health"

Abstract

Air pollution contributes to the premature deaths of millions of people each year around the world, and air quality problems are growing in many developing nations. While past policy efforts have succeeded in reducing particulate matter and trace gases in North America and Europe, adverse health effects are found at even these lower levels of air pollution. Future policy actions will benefit from improved understanding of the interactions and health effects of different chemical species and source categories. Achieving this new understanding requires air pollution scientists and engineers to work increasingly closely with health scientists. In particular, research is needed to better understand the chemical and physical properties of complex air pollutant mixtures, and to use new observations provided by satellites, advanced in situ measurement techniques, and distributed micro monitoring networks, coupled with models, to better characterize air pollution exposure for epidemiological and toxicological research, and to better quantify the effects of specific source sectors and mitigation strategies.

Figure 1.

Total rate of health burden in 2013 due to exposure to ambient PM_2.5 pollution (disability-adjusted life-years per year per 100 000 population), from the Global Burden of Disease 2013 (Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington).

Figure 2.

Ratio of estimated annual average PM_2.5 concentrations in 2013 to 1990, at 0.1° × 0.1° resolution, following methods of Brauer et al. (2016). Red indicates a large relative increase during this period; green indicates decreases.

Figure 3.

Satellite image showing a thick river of haze over the Indo-Gangetic Plain on January 10, 2013, as captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory. (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80148).