Policymakers are often faced with decisions affecting human health and mortality risk. For example, new vehicle fuel efficiency standards may lead to higher costs for consumers but could also save lives by improving air quality in urban areas, thus creating a trade-off between economic costs and the value of reducing mortality risk. Yet, too often, these economic trade-offs are not assessed in a s...

This toolkit was developed to help public health professionals communicate more effectively with policymakers.Public health professionals must communicate effectively with policymakers because they are the decision-makers who allocate resources, set priorities, and create the policies that determine community health outcomes. State and local policymakers are particularly influential in these areas...

In this paper, the authors present findings from a multiyear expert judgment study that comprehensively characterizes uncertainty in estimates of mortality reductions associated with decreases in fine particulate matter (PM(2.5)) in the U.S. Appropriate characterization of uncertainty is critical because mortality-related benefits represent up to 90% of the monetized benefits reported in the Envir...

Reduced-form modeling approaches are an increasingly popular way to rapidly estimate air quality and human health impacts related to changes in air pollutant emissions. These approaches reduce computation time by making simplifying assumptions about pollutant source characteristics, transport and chemistry. Two reduced form tools used by the Environmental Protection Agency in recent assessments ar...

The authors found that 1·67 million (95% uncertainty interval 1·42–1·92) deaths were attributable to air pollution in India in 2019, accounting for 17·8% (15·8–19·5) of the total deaths in the country. The majority of these deaths were from ambient particulate matter pollution (0·98 million [0·77–1·19]) and household air pollution (0·61 million [0·39–0·86]). The death rate due to household air pol...

This preprint investigates the health and economic impacts of transboundary transport of fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) between neighbouring metropolitan areas in Mexico. The study examines how emissions from the Mexico City Metropolitan Area contribute to air pollution exposure in surrounding regions, specifically the Toluca Valley and Cuernavaca metropolitan areas. Using the Hybrid Single Parti...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency undertook a case study in the Detroit metropolitan area to test the viability of a new multipollutant risk-based (MP/RB) approach to air quality management, informed by spatially resolved air quality, population, and baseline health data. The case study demonstrated that the MP/RB approach approximately doubled the human health benefits achieved by the trad...

Air pollution epidemiology plays an integral role in both identifying the hazards of air pollution as well as supplying the risk coefficients that are used in quantitative risk assessments. Evidence from both epidemiology and risk assessments has historically supported critical environmental policy decisions. The extent to which risk assessors can properly specify a quantitative risk assessment an...

Economic and health benefits assessments of air quality changes often quantify and report changes in deaths at a given point in time. The typical approach uses a method that attributes air pollution-related health impacts to a single year air quality change (or “pulse”). The perspective on benefits from these static pulse analyses can be enhanced by conducting a dynamic population assessment using...

IPUMS International is a global data platform that provides harmonized census and survey microdata from more than 100 countries, enabling researchers and policymakers to conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses of population characteristics. The platform integrates anonymized individual- and household-level census data collected by national statistical offices, standardizing variables and ...