The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the regulated community continually seek effective and efficient methods of improving compliance with environmental regulations. From 1996 through 1998, EPA and the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) worked together to pilot an approach for identifying and evaluating the root causes (that is, underlying causes) of noncompliance with regulato...

Environmental decisions often rely upon observational data or model estimates. For instance, evaluation of human health or ecological risks often includes information on pollutant emission rates, environmental concentrations, exposures, and exposure/dose-response data. Whether measured or modeled, each of these elements of information has certain underlying limitations. In addition to basic accura...

Extensive epidemiologic evidence supports a linear, no-threshold concentration-response (C-R) relationship between long-term exposure to fine particles (PM2.5) and mortality in the United States. While examinations of the C-R relationship are designed to assess the shape of the C-R curve, they do not provide the information needed to quantitatively characterize uncertainty at specific PM2.5 concen...

The estimates used to value mortality risk reductions are a major determinant of the benefits of many public health and environmental policies. These estimates (typically expressed as the value per statistical life, VSL) describe the willingness of those affected by a policy to exchange their own income for the risk reductions they experience. While these values are relatively well studied in high...

Air pollution risk assessments typically estimate ozone-attributable mortality counts using concentration-response (C-R) parameters from epidemiologic studies that treat temperature as a potential confounder. However, some recent epidemiologic studies have indicated temperature modifies the relationship between short-term ozone exposure and mortality, which has potentially important implications w...

Many time-series studies have characterized the relationship between short-term ozone exposure and adverse health outcomes, controlling for temperature as a confounder. Temperature may also modify ozone effects, though this has been largely under-investigated. In this study, authors explored whether temperature modifies the effect of short-term ozone exposure on mortality. They used the database d...

The benefit per ton ($/ton) of reducing PM2.5 varies by the location of the emission reduction, the type of source emitting the precursor, and the specific precursor controlled. This paper examines how each of these factors influences the magnitude of the $/ton estimate. Authors employ a reduced-form air quality model to predict changes in ambient PM2.5 resulting from an array of emission control ...

In this technical support document (TSD) authors describe the air quality modeling performed to support the Final Transport Rule (TR). For this rule the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used air quality modeling to:identify locations expected to be nonattainment or have maintenance problems for annual (average) PM2.5, 24-hour PM2.5, and/or 8-hour ozone for the analytic years chosen for the TR...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (USEPA OAQPS) prepares estimates of the benefits and costs of air quality regulations. OAQPS also assesses the sensitivity of the benefits and costs to uncertainties in the data and assumptions used for their analyses. As part of EPA’s efforts to assess uncertainty, RTI and Lumina Decision Systems developed an ...

National-scale health impact assessments (HIAs) have been conducted for many years and have become reasonably systematized. Recently, there has been growing interest in utilizing HIA methods at local scales, in the context of Environmental Public Health Tracking and in other settings. This paper investigates the data and analytical challenges to estimating the incidence of health effects associate...