EAPSI: Examining the Long-term Health Benefits of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Actions in Heavily Polluted Regions

Kim Chloe, Salem MA

Investigators

Abstract

The overall objective of this project is to examine the long-term health benefits of the 2013 "Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan" in one of the most heavily polluted and populated regions in China: the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. The project will be conducted at Tsinghua University under the mentorship of Dr. Shuxiao Wang, who is a noted expert in air pollution research. China is an ideal location to conduct air pollution research because of its available and abundant resources, as well as its political, scientific, and societal interests in the topic. This project will examine the health benefits, such as reduced cardiovascular outcome or premature deaths, of China's new comprehensive air pollution policy, which has resulted in reduced PM2.5 levels. Air pollution is a global environmental issue that is affecting both developed and developing countries, and has local air quality and also global climate impacts. Therefore, even though the research will be conducted in China, it will have impacts on the global community. Because China is one of the major emitters of air pollution, providing quantifiable information on: 1) existing pollution levels, 2) expected improvements in air quality from the new air pollution policy, and 3) estimated health benefits will enhance the global community's general and scientific understanding of this important issue. There are three input components to be used in the project. The first component, "Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) output" , will have estimates of changes in ambient PM2.5 under the action plan. Second, demographic data will be collected from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. Lastly, "concentration-response functions (CRFs)" for premature death attributable to PM2.5 as well as other disease outcomes of interest will be derived from the epidemiological literature and expert syntheses of literature relevant to China. CRFs will represent the effect of changes in PM2.5 on health outcome incidence of interest. China's current circumstance - highly elevated PM2.5 concentrations, a large number of affected individuals, and rapidly changing pollution control measures - will offer some unique scenarios to investigate under the proposed project. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.