Title: Urban hybriD models for AiR pollution exposure Assessment (UDARA)
Funder: Natural Environment Research Council

Abstract: Urban hybriD models for AiR pollution exposure Assessment (UDARA) Air pollution affects the health of the world's population. The WHO estimate that 3.7 million deaths are annually attributable to outdoor air pollution (6.7% of all deaths globally) and urged Member States to develop air quality monitoring systems and health registries to improve surveillance for all illnesses related to air pollution. Establishing and maintaining air quality monitoring infrastructure can be costly. Furthermore, air quality monitoring alone does not provide the basis for robust analysis of health outcomes or onward air quality management. Health risks due to air pollution in densely-populated Indonesian urban areas are increasingly associated with transport activities, whilst forest fire emissions further exacerbate health impacts associated with air-pollution. This represents a major health concern for Indonesia with both economic and welfare implications. In order to enable effective control measures that are feasible within wider development, welfare and economic goals, much improved quantification of the exposure of the population to pollution is required. To enable such quantification, the contributions from long-range and local sources pollutants and the availability of suitable health data to the determine health impacts of pollutant exposure must be established. The UDARA project will be a multidisciplinary collaboration between the University of Manchester and 3 Indonesian Institutions; the Institut Teknologi Bandung, National Nuclear Energy Agency of Indonesia and the University of Padjadjaran involving exposure scientists, atmospheric scientists and health scientists. The project will develop a new approach for providing reliable exposure estimates for analysing the impact of air pollution on health outcomes in Indonesian cities. It will employ a new methodology developed within the EU ESCAPE project in response to the lack of European-specific data on exposure-response relationships and the uncertainty introduced into health outcome analyses by the use of varied exposure models. ESCAPE developed standardised protocols for developing and testing LUR models, while still allowing sufficient flexibility to incorporate application specific factors. The further refinement to incorporate remote sensing and chemical transport model outputs has improved model performance in complex pollution climates such as experienced in Indonesia. The ESCAPE project involved the development of both classic and hybrid models but their performance in the sort of pollution climate seen in Indonesian urban areas has yet to be investigated. Within UDARA, we will collect new data in Jakarta, a heavily populated city with a pollution problem dominated by urban emissions, and a second city in Sumatera substantially influenced by seasonal biomass burning. The highly spatially resolved measurements of both gaseous and particulate pollutants and data from two 3D pollution models will be used within the ESCAPE methodology to derive pollutant exposure estimates for the two cities. We will additionally conduct an evaluation of the quality and quantity of Indonesian health outcome data that can be used for subsequent future epidemiological studies. UDARA will thereby provide a new methodology and robust basis for evaluating the health outcomes from air pollution exposure in Indonesia.


Research activity codes: 2.5 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: RESPIRATORY;GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE