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Particulate matter-attributable mortality and relationships with carbon dioxide in 250 urban areas worldwide.

ABSTRACT: Urban air pollution is high on global health and sustainability agendas, but information is limited on associated city-level disease burdens. We estimated fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) mortality in the 250 most populous cities worldwide using PM_2.5 concentrations, population, disease rates, and concentration-response relationships from the Global Burden of Disease 2016 Study. Only 8% of these cities had population-weighted mean concentrations below the World Health Organization guideline for annual average PM_2.5. City-level PM_2.5-attributable mortality rates ranged from 13-125 deaths per 100,000 people. PM_2.5 mortality rates and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission rates were weakly positively correlated, with regional influences apparent from clustering of cities within each region. Across 82 cities globally, PM_2.5 concentrations and mortality rates were negatively associated with city gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, but we found no relationship between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions rates. While results provide only a cross-sectional snapshot of cities worldwide, they point to opportunities for cities to realize climate, air quality, and health co-benefits through low-carbon development. Future work should examine drivers of the relationships (e.g. development stage, fuel mix for electricity generation and transportation, sector-specific PM_2.5 and CO₂ emissions) uncovered here and explore uncertainties to test the robustness of our conclusions.

SUBMITTER: Anenberg SC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6689059 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Particulate matter-attributable mortality and relationships with carbon dioxide in 250 urban areas worldwide.

Anenberg Susan C SC Achakulwisut Pattanun P Brauer Michael M Moran Daniel D Apte Joshua S JS Henze Daven K DK

Scientific reports 20190809 1

Urban air pollution is high on global health and sustainability agendas, but information is limited on associated city-level disease burdens. We estimated fine particulate matter (PM<sub>2.5</sub>) mortality in the 250 most populous cities worldwide using PM<sub>2.5</sub> concentrations, population, disease rates, and concentration-response relationships from the Global Burden of Disease 2016 Study. Only 8% of these cities had population-weighted mean concentrations below the World Health Organi ...[more]

PMID: 31399636

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Project description:BackgroundWith much of the world's population residing in urban areas, an understanding of air pollution exposures at the city level can inform mitigation approaches. Previous studies of global urban air pollution have not considered trends in air pollutant concentrations nor corresponding attributable mortality burdens. We aimed to estimate trends in fine particulate matter (PM2·5) concentrations and associated mortality for cities globally.MethodsWe use high-resolution annual average PM2·5 concentrations, epidemiologically derived concentration response functions, and country-level baseline disease rates to estimate population-weighted PM2·5 concentrations and attributable cause-specific mortality in 13 160 urban centres between the years 2000 and 2019.FindingsAlthough regional averages of urban PM2·5 concentrations decreased between the years 2000 and 2019, we found considerable heterogeneity in trends of PM2·5 concentrations between urban areas. Approximately 86% (2·5 billion inhabitants) of urban inhabitants lived in urban areas that exceeded WHO's 2005 guideline annual average PM2·5 (10 μg/m3), resulting in an excess of 1·8 million (95% CI 1·34 million-2·3 million) deaths in 2019. Regional averages of PM2·5-attributable deaths increased in all regions except for Europe and the Americas, driven by changes in population numbers, age structures, and disease rates. In some cities, PM2·5-attributable mortality increased despite decreases in PM2·5 concentrations, resulting from shifting age distributions and rates of non-communicable disease.InterpretationOur study showed that, between the years 2000 and 2019, most of the world's urban population lived in areas with unhealthy levels of PM2·5, leading to substantial contributions to non-communicable disease burdens. Our results highlight that avoiding the large public health burden from urban PM2·5 will require strategies that reduce exposure through emissions mitigation, as well as strategies that reduce vulnerability to PM2·5 by improving overall public health.FundingNASA, Wellcome Trust.

Dataset Information

Particulate matter-attributable mortality and relationships with carbon dioxide in 250 urban areas worldwide.

Publications

Particulate matter-attributable mortality and relationships with carbon dioxide in 250 urban areas worldwide.

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