Potential health benefits of eliminating traffic emissions in urban areas
Potential health benefits of eliminating traffic emissions in urban areas
Traffic is one of the major contributors to PM
2.5 in cities worldwide. Quantifying the role of traffic is an important step towards understanding the impact of transport policies on the possibilities to achieve cleaner air and accompanying health benefits. With the aim of estimating potential health benefits of eliminating traffic emissions, we carried out a meta-analysis using the World Health Organisation (WHO) database of source apportionment studies of PM
2.5 concentrations. Specifically, we used a Bayesian meta-regression approach, modelling both overall and traffic-related (tailpipe and non-tailpipe) concentrations simultaneously. We obtained the distributions of expected PM
2.5 concentrations (posterior densities) of different types for 117 cities worldwide. Using the non-linear Integrated Exposure Response (IER) function of PM
2.5, we estimated percent reduction in different disease endpoints for a scenario with complete removal of traffic emissions. We found that eliminating traffic emissions results in achieving the WHO-recommended concentration of PM
2.5 only for a handful of cities that already have low concentrations of pollution. The percentage reduction in premature mortality due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases increases up to a point (30–40 ug/ m
3), and above this concentration, it flattens off. For diabetes-related mortality, the percentage reduction in mortality decreases with increasing concentrations—a trend that is opposite to other outcomes. For cities with high concentrations of pollution, the results highlight the need for multi-sectoral strategies to reduce pollution. The IER functions of PM
2.5 result in diminishing returns of health benefits at high concentrations, and in case of diabetes, there are even negative returns. The results show the significant effect of the shape of IER functions on health benefits. Overall, despite the diminishing results, a significant burden of deaths can be prevented by policies that aim to reduce traffic emissions even at high concentrations of pollution.
e0264803
Heydari, Shahram
0d12a583-a4e8-4888-9e51-a50d312be1e9
Asgharian, Masoud
746e5632-7712-489d-a429-18300c6254f4
Kelly, Frank J.
8eda554f-c23c-4321-b5e2-b99a72dfd0aa
Goel, Rahul
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March 2022
Heydari, Shahram
0d12a583-a4e8-4888-9e51-a50d312be1e9
Asgharian, Masoud
746e5632-7712-489d-a429-18300c6254f4
Kelly, Frank J.
8eda554f-c23c-4321-b5e2-b99a72dfd0aa
Goel, Rahul
1a4dcabc-ccc9-475e-bc8b-15e657ace149
Heydari, Shahram, Asgharian, Masoud, Kelly, Frank J. and Goel, Rahul
(2022)
Potential health benefits of eliminating traffic emissions in urban areas.
PLoS ONE, 17 (3), , [e0264803].
(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264803).
Abstract
Traffic is one of the major contributors to PM
2.5 in cities worldwide. Quantifying the role of traffic is an important step towards understanding the impact of transport policies on the possibilities to achieve cleaner air and accompanying health benefits. With the aim of estimating potential health benefits of eliminating traffic emissions, we carried out a meta-analysis using the World Health Organisation (WHO) database of source apportionment studies of PM
2.5 concentrations. Specifically, we used a Bayesian meta-regression approach, modelling both overall and traffic-related (tailpipe and non-tailpipe) concentrations simultaneously. We obtained the distributions of expected PM
2.5 concentrations (posterior densities) of different types for 117 cities worldwide. Using the non-linear Integrated Exposure Response (IER) function of PM
2.5, we estimated percent reduction in different disease endpoints for a scenario with complete removal of traffic emissions. We found that eliminating traffic emissions results in achieving the WHO-recommended concentration of PM
2.5 only for a handful of cities that already have low concentrations of pollution. The percentage reduction in premature mortality due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases increases up to a point (30–40 ug/ m
3), and above this concentration, it flattens off. For diabetes-related mortality, the percentage reduction in mortality decreases with increasing concentrations—a trend that is opposite to other outcomes. For cities with high concentrations of pollution, the results highlight the need for multi-sectoral strategies to reduce pollution. The IER functions of PM
2.5 result in diminishing returns of health benefits at high concentrations, and in case of diabetes, there are even negative returns. The results show the significant effect of the shape of IER functions on health benefits. Overall, despite the diminishing results, a significant burden of deaths can be prevented by policies that aim to reduce traffic emissions even at high concentrations of pollution.
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pm25Health_plosone_R1 250122 clean
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Accepted/In Press date: 16 February 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 9 March 2022
Published date: March 2022
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© 2022 Heydari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Local EPrints ID: 455848
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/455848
ISSN: 1932-6203
PURE UUID: 00109b16-94d9-4f4b-a157-96c2e08ab3d5
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Date deposited: 06 Apr 2022 16:54
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 16:23
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Author:
Masoud Asgharian
Author:
Frank J. Kelly
Author:
Rahul Goel
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