Response of South Asia PM pollution to ammonia emission changes and associated impacts on human health.

Countries in South Asia are suffering severe PM pollution with rapid economic development, impacting human health and the environment. Whilst much attention has been given to understanding the contribution of primary emissions, the contribution of agriculture to PM concentrations, especially from agricultural ammonia (NH) emissions, remains less explored. Using an advanced regional atmospheric chemistry and transport modelling system (WRF-EMEP) with a new estimate of anthropogenic NH emissions inputs, we estimate the influence of agricultural NH emissions on surface PM in South Asia and evaluate the health impacts and the economic losses attributable to PM in 2018.

Life-course exposure to air pollution and the risk of dementia in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936.

Background: Air pollution in later life has been associated with dementia; however, limited research has investigated the association between air pollution across the life course, either at specific life periods or cumulatively. The project investigates the association of air pollution with dementia via a life-course epidemiological approach.

Methods: Participants of the Lothian Birth Cohort, born in 1936, provided lifetime residential history in 2014.

Health impact of policies to reduce agriculture-related air pollutants in the UK: The relative contribution of change in PM exposure and diets to morbidity and mortality.

Food systems can negatively impact health outcomes through unhealthy diets and indirectly through ammonia emissions originating from agricultural production, which contribute to air pollution and consequently cardiovascular and respiratory health outcomes. In the UK, ammonia emissions from agriculture have not declined in the same way as other air pollutants in recent years. We applied a novel integrated modelling framework to assess the health impacts from six ammonia reduction scenarios to 2030: two agriculture scenarios - a "Current trends" scenario projecting current mitigation measures to reflect a low ambition future, and "High ambition mitigation" based on measures included in the Climate Change Committee's Balanced Pathway to Net Zero; three dietary scenarios - a "Business as usual" based on past trajectories, "Fiscal" applying 20% tax on meat and dairy and 20% subsidy on fruit and vegetables, and "Innovation" applying a 30% switch to plant-based alternatives; one combination of "High ambition mitigation" and "Innovation".

Ozone pollution contributes to the yield gap for beans in Uganda, East Africa, and is co-located with other agricultural stresses.

Air quality negatively impacts agriculture, reducing the yield of staple food crops. While measured data on African ground-level ozone levels are scarce, experimental studies demonstrate the damaging impact of ozone on crops. Common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), an ozone-sensitive crop, are widely grown in Uganda.

Higher air pollution exposure in early life is associated with worse health among older adults: A 72-year follow-up study from Scotland.

Air pollution increases the risk of mortality and morbidity. However, limited evidence exists on the very long-term associations between early life air pollution exposure and health, as well as on potential pathways. This study explored the relationship between fine particle (PM) exposure at age 3 and limiting long-term illness (LLTI) at ages 55, 65 and 75 using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort 1936, a representative administrative cohort study.

Early life PM exposure, childhood cognitive ability and mortality between age 11 and 86: A record-linkage life-course study from Scotland.

Background: Living in areas with high air pollution concentrations is associated with all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Exposure in sensitive developmental periods might be long-lasting but studies with very long follow-up are rare, and mediating pathways between early life exposure and life-course mortality are not fully understood.

Methods: Data were drawn from the Scottish Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort of 1936, a representative record-linkage study comprising 5% of the Scottish population born in 1936.

Future impacts of O on respiratory hospital admission in the UK from current emissions policies.

Exposure to ambient ozone (O) O is associated with impacts on human health. O is a secondary pollutant whose concentrations are determined inter alia by emissions of precursors such as oxides of nitrogen (NO) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and thus future health burdens depend on policies relating to climate and air quality. While emission controls are expected to reduce levels of PM and NO and their associated mortality burdens, for secondary pollutants like O the picture is less clear.

Impacts of emissions policies on future UK mortality burdens associated with air pollution.

Air pollution is the greatest environmental risk to public health. Future air pollution concentrations are primarily determined by precursor emissions, which are driven by environmental policies relating to climate and air pollution. Detailed health impact assessments (HIA) are necessary to provide quantitative estimates of the impacts of future air pollution to support decision-makers developing environmental policy and targets.

Modelling benzo(a)pyrene concentrations for different meteorological conditions - Analysis of lung cancer cases and associated economic costs.

Air pollution originating from the household presents a significant burden to public health, especially during the wintertime in countries, such as Poland, where coal substantially contributes to the energy market. One of the most hazardous components of particulate matter is benzo(a)pyrene (BaP). This study focusses on the impact of different meteorological conditions on BaP concentrations in Poland and associated impacts on human health and economic burdens.

Reduced-form and complex ACTM modelling for air quality policy development: A model inter-comparison.

Simulation models can be valuable tools in supporting development of air pollution policy. However, exploration of future scenarios depends on reliable and robust modelling to provide confidence in outcomes which cannot be tested against measurements. Here we focus on the UK Integrated Assessment Model, a fast reduced-form model with a purpose to support policy development with modelling of multiple alternative future scenarios, and the EMEP4UK model which is a complex Eulerian Atmospheric Chemistry Transport Model requiring significant computing resources.

Mitigating the impact of air pollution on dementia and brain health: Setting the policy agenda.

Background: Emerging research suggests exposure to high levels of air pollution at critical points in the life-course is detrimental to brain health, including cognitive decline and dementia. Social determinants play a significant role, including socio-economic deprivation, environmental factors and heightened health and social inequalities. Policies have been proposed more generally, but their benefits for brain health have yet to be fully explored.

Life-course exposure to air pollution and biological ageing in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936.

Background: Exposure to air pollution is associated with a range of diseases. Biomarkers derived from DNA methylation (DNAm) offer potential mechanistic insights into human health differences, connecting disease pathogenesis and biological ageing. However, little is known about sensitive periods during the life course where air pollution might have a stronger impact on DNAm, or whether effects accumulate over time.

Abating ammonia is more cost-effective than nitrogen oxides for mitigating PM air pollution.

Fine particulate matter (PM, particles with a mass median aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers) in the atmosphere is associated with severe negative impacts on human health, and the gases sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and ammonia are the main PM precursors. However, their contribution to global health impacts has not yet been analyzed.

Quantifying the impact of ozone on crops in Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates regional and local hotspots of production loss.

Tropospheric ozone can have a detrimental effect on vegetation, including reducing the quantity of crop yield. This study uses modelled ozone flux values (PODIAM; phytotoxic ozone dose above 3 nmol m s, parameterised for integrated assessment modelling) for 2015, together with species-specific flux-effect relationships, spatial data on production and growing season dates to quantify the impact of ozone on the production of common wheat (Triticum aestivum) and common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A case study for South Africa was also done using detailed data per province.

Life Course Air Pollution Exposure and Cognitive Decline: Modelled Historical Air Pollution Data and the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936.

Background: Air pollution has been consistently linked with dementia and cognitive decline. However, it is unclear whether risk is accumulated through long-term exposure or whether there are sensitive/critical periods. A key barrier to clarifying this relationship is the dearth of historical air pollution data.

A Satellite-Based Spatio-Temporal Machine Learning Model to Reconstruct Daily PM Concentrations across Great Britain.

Epidemiological studies on the health effects of air pollution usually rely on measurements from fixed ground monitors, which provide limited spatio-temporal coverage. Data from satellites, reanalysis, and chemical transport models offer additional information used to reconstruct pollution concentrations at high spatio-temporal resolutions. This study aims to develop a multi-stage satellite-based machine learning model to estimate daily fine particulate matter (PM) levels across Great Britain between 2008-2018.

Potential and limitation of air pollution mitigation by vegetation and uncertainties of deposition-based evaluations.

The potential to capture additional air pollutants by introducing more vegetation or changing existing short vegetation to woodland on first sight provides an attractive route for lowering urban pollution. Here, an atmospheric chemistry and transport model was run with a range of landcover scenarios to quantify pollutant removal by the existing total UK vegetation as well as the UK urban vegetation and to quantify the effect of large-scale urban tree planting on urban air pollution. UK vegetation as a whole reduces area (population)-weighted concentrations significantly, by 10% (9%) for PM, 30% (22%) for SO, 24% (19%) for NH and 15% (13%) for O, compared with a desert scenario.

A chronology of global air quality.

Air pollution has been recognized as a threat to human health since the time of Hippocrates, 400 BC. Successive written accounts of air pollution occur in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, show the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centres and close to industry, and the chemical characteristics of the gases and particulate matter. The industrial revolution accelerated both the magnitude of emissions of the primary pollutants and the geographical spread of contributing countries as highly polluted cities became the defining issue, culminating with the great smog of London in 1952.

Alkaline air: changing perspectives on nitrogen and air pollution in an ammonia-rich world.

Ammonia and ammonium have received less attention than other forms of air pollution, with limited progress in controlling emissions at UK, European and global scales. By contrast, these compounds have been of significant past interest to science and society, the recollection of which can inform future strategies. Sal ammoniac (, ) is found to have been extremely valuable in long-distance trade ( AD 600-1150) from Egypt and China, where 6-8 kg N could purchase a human life, while air pollution associated with collection was attributed to this nitrogen form.

Impact of long-term nitrogen deposition on the response of dune grassland ecosystems to elevated summer ozone.

Nitrogen deposition and tropospheric ozone are important drivers of vegetation damage, but their interactive effects are poorly understood. This study assessed whether long-term nitrogen deposition altered sensitivity to ozone in a semi-natural vegetation community. Mesocosms were collected from sand dune grassland in the UK along a nitrogen gradient (5-25 kg N/ha/y, including two plots from a long-term experiment), and fumigated for 2.

The influence of residential and workday population mobility on exposure to air pollution in the UK.

Traditional approaches of quantifying population-level exposure to air pollution assume that concentrations of air pollutants at the residential address of the study population are representative for overall exposure. This introduces potential bias in the quantification of human health effects. Our study combines new UK Census data comprising information on workday population densities, with high spatio-temporal resolution air pollution concentration fields from the WRF-EMEP4UK atmospheric chemistry transport model, to derive more realistic estimates of population exposure to NO, PM and O.

Improving predictive asthma algorithms with modelled environment data for Scotland: an observational cohort study protocol.

Introduction: Asthma has a considerable, but potentially, avoidable burden on many populations globally. Scotland has some of the poorest health outcomes from asthma. Although ambient pollution, weather changes and sociodemographic factors have been associated with asthma attacks, it remains unclear whether modelled environment data and geospatial information can improve population-based asthma predictive algorithms.