Development And Pilot Study Of GIS-Based Analysis Software On Health Benefit Of PM_2.5 Control

With the rapid economic development, air pollution remains a serious issue in China, resulting in increasing adverse health outcomes. Due to the high PM pollution, it is urgently for Chinese governments to develop effective control measures. However, there is no available assessment tool recently to provide quick and science-based decision support information for policy-makers in China.To address the need, this study establishes an integrated air quality attainment and evaluation system including SMAT-CE and Ben MAP-CE for health benefit analysis. SMAT-CE is used to perform the attainment test for air pollutants’ concentration, and also generate air quality grid data through combing the spatial distribution of model simulations and the observations. Based on the air quality data generated by SMAT-CE, Ben MAP-CE is used to estimate the health impact and quantify the economic benefit with reasonable geographic spatial distribution. Thus, this GIS-based assessment system can build up a comprehensive relationship between air pollution control strategy and its health benefits, providing data support for optimizing the air pollution control strategy.The assessment system is applied in the U.S. firstly. After that, it is localized through some adjustments to match the requirement in Chinese research, and then applied in PRD. This study design a PM2.5 emission control scenario containing 35% reduction of on-road mobile sources, and 65% of fugitive dust to perform the attainment test and evaluate the health benefit results. Results show that the annual average PM2.5 concentration decrease by 6.8μg/m3 compared to baseline value. Annual average PM2.5 concentration of two more cities(Zhongshan and Huizhou) is expected to meet the standard level(35μg/m3) in addition to Shenzhen and Zhuhai. The evaluation results shows that the air improvement will result in 590(95% CI, 271- 906) annual premature avoidable deaths, and a total benefit of 1.1(95% CI, 0.5 – 1.7) billion CNY, although the health outcomes only include the acute health effect. In addition, this study also estimates the disease burden of PRD in 2014. The total economic losses caused by PM2.5 pollution reaches 8.4 billion CNY a year. The results reflect the huge benefits of PM pollution abatement, and strongly require policy makers to implement effective pollution control policies to control PM2.5 pollution in PRD.