Equity and modeling in sustainability science: Examples and opportunities throughout the process.

Equity is core to sustainability, but current interventions to enhance sustainability often fall short in adequately addressing this linkage. Models are important tools for informing action, and their development and use present opportunities to center equity in process and outcomes. This Perspective highlights progress in integrating equity into systems modeling in sustainability science, as well as key challenges, tensions, and future directions.

Air quality policy should quantify effects on disparities.

New tools can guide US policies to better target and reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution exposure.

Combining Satellite-Derived PM Data and a Reduced-Form Air Quality Model to Support Air Quality Analysis in US Cities.

Air quality models can support pollution mitigation design by simulating policy scenarios and conducting source contribution analyses. The Intervention Model for Air Pollution (InMAP) is a powerful tool for equitable policy design as its variable resolution grid enables intra-urban analysis, the scale of which most environmental justice inquiries are levied. However, InMAP underestimates particulate sulfate and overestimates particulate ammonium formation, errors that limit the model's relevance to city-scale decision-making.

Environmental Health, Racial/Ethnic Health Disparity, and Climate Impacts of Inter-Regional Freight Transport in the United States.

We quantify and compare three environmental impacts from inter-regional freight transportation in the contiguous United States: total mortality attributable to PM air pollution, racial-ethnic disparities in PM-attributable mortality, and CO emissions. We compare all major freight modes (truck, rail, barge, aircraft) and routes (∼30,000 routes). Our study is the first to comprehensively compare each route separately and the first to explore racial-ethnic exposure disparities by route and mode, nationally.

Location-specific strategies for eliminating US national racial-ethnic [Formula: see text] exposure inequality.

Air pollution levels in the United States have decreased dramatically over the past decades, yet national racial-ethnic exposure disparities persist. For ambient fine particulate matter ([Formula: see text]), we investigate three emission-reduction approaches and compare their optimal ability to address two goals: 1) reduce the overall population average exposure ("overall average") and 2) reduce the difference in the average exposure for the most exposed racial-ethnic group versus for the overall population ("national inequalities"). We show that national inequalities in exposure can be eliminated with minor emission reductions (optimal: ~1% of total emissions) if they target specific locations.

Sources of ambient PM exposure in 96 global cities.

To improve air quality, knowledge of the sources and locations of air pollutant emissions is critical. However, for many global cities, no previous estimates exist of how much exposure to fine particulate matter (PM), the largest environmental cause of mortality, is caused by emissions within the city vs. outside its boundaries.

Global, high-resolution, reduced-complexity air quality modeling for PM2.5 using InMAP (Intervention Model for Air Pollution).

Each year, millions of premature deaths worldwide are caused by exposure to outdoor air pollution, especially fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Designing policies to reduce these deaths relies on air quality modeling for estimating changes in PM2.

Wildfire, Smoke Exposure, Human Health, and Environmental Justice Need to be Integrated into Forest Restoration and Management.

Purpose Of Review: Increasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. Climate change and more than a century of fire exclusion and wildfire suppression have led to contemporary wildfires with more severe environmental impacts and human smoke exposure. Wildfires increase smoke exposure for broad swaths of the US population, though outdoor workers and socially disadvantaged groups with limited adaptive capacity can be disproportionally exposed.

Air quality-related health damages of food.

Agriculture is a major contributor to air pollution, the largest environmental risk factor for mortality in the United States and worldwide. It is largely unknown, however, how individual foods or entire diets affect human health via poor air quality. We show how food production negatively impacts human health by increasing atmospheric fine particulate matter (PM), and we identify ways to reduce these negative impacts of agriculture.

PM polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States.

Racial-ethnic minorities in the United States are exposed to disproportionately high levels of ambient fine particulate air pollution (PM), the largest environmental cause of human mortality. However, it is unknown which emission sources drive this disparity and whether differences exist by emission sector, geography, or demographics. Quantifying the PM exposure caused by each emitter type, we show that nearly all major emission categories-consistently across states, urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels-contribute to the systemic PM exposure disparity experienced by people of color.

Fine Particulate Air Pollution from Electricity Generation in the US: Health Impacts by Race, Income, and Geography.

Electricity generation is a large contributor to fine particulate matter (PM) air pollution. However, the demographic distribution of the resulting exposure is largely unknown. We estimate exposures to and health impacts of PM from electricity generation in the US, for each of the seven Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), for each US state, by income and by race.

Fine-scale damage estimates of particulate matter air pollution reveal opportunities for location-specific mitigation of emissions.

Fine particulate matter (PM) air pollution has been recognized as a major source of mortality in the United States for at least 25 years, yet much remains unknown about which sources are the most harmful, let alone how best to target policies to mitigate them. Such efforts can be improved by employing high-resolution geographically explicit methods for quantifying human health impacts of emissions of PM and its precursors. Here, we provide a detailed examination of the health and economic impacts of PM pollution in the United States by linking emission sources with resulting pollution concentrations.

Inequity in consumption of goods and services adds to racial-ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure.

Fine particulate matter (PM) air pollution exposure is the largest environmental health risk factor in the United States. Here, we link PM exposure to the human activities responsible for PM pollution. We use these results to explore "pollution inequity": the difference between the environmental health damage caused by a racial-ethnic group and the damage that group experiences.

Ancillary health effects of climate mitigation scenarios as drivers of policy uptake: a review of air quality, transportation and diet co-benefits modeling studies.

Background: Significant mitigation efforts beyond the Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs) coming out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement are required to avoid warming of 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures. Health co-benefits represent selected near term, positive consequences of climate policies that can offset mitigation costs in the short term before the beneficial impacts of those policies on the magnitude of climate change are evident. The diversity of approaches to modeling mitigation options and their health effects inhibits meta-analyses and syntheses of results useful in policy-making.

InMAP: A model for air pollution interventions.

Mechanistic air pollution modeling is essential in air quality management, yet the extensive expertise and computational resources required to run most models prevent their use in many situations where their results would be useful. Here, we present InMAP (Intervention Model for Air Pollution), which offers an alternative to comprehensive air quality models for estimating the air pollution health impacts of emission reductions and other potential interventions. InMAP estimates annual-average changes in primary and secondary fine particle (PM2.

Life cycle air quality impacts of conventional and alternative light-duty transportation in the United States.

Commonly considered strategies for reducing the environmental impact of light-duty transportation include using alternative fuels and improving vehicle fuel economy. We evaluate the air quality-related human health impacts of 10 such options, including the use of liquid biofuels, diesel, and compressed natural gas (CNG) in internal combustion engines; the use of electricity from a range of conventional and renewable sources to power electric vehicles (EVs); and the use of hybrid EV technology. Our approach combines spatially, temporally, and chemically detailed life cycle emission inventories; comprehensive, fine-scale state-of-the-science chemical transport modeling; and exposure, concentration-response, and economic health impact modeling for ozone (O3) and fine particulate matter (PM2.

A spatially and temporally explicit life cycle inventory of air pollutants from gasoline and ethanol in the United States.

The environmental health impacts of transportation depend in part on where and when emissions occur during fuel production and combustion. Here we describe spatially and temporally explicit life cycle inventories (LCI) of air pollutants from gasoline, ethanol derived from corn grain, and ethanol from corn stover. Previous modeling for the U.

Natural and anthropogenic ethanol sources inNorth America and potential atmospheric impacts of ethanol fuel use.

We used an ensemble of aircraft measurements with the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to constrain present-day North American ethanol sources, and gauge potential long-range impacts of increased ethanol fuel use. We find that current ethanol emissions are underestimated by 50% in Western North America, and overestimated by a factor of 2 in the east. Our best estimate for year-2005 North American ethanol emissions is 670 GgC/y, with 440 GgC/y from the continental U.