In the News
September 12, 2017
Indians could live four years longer on average, if India is able to reduce air pollution to comply with the World Health Organisation’s standards, according to the Air Quality-Life Index (AQLI) tool developed by the Energy Policy Institute at The University of Chicago (EPIC).
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The AQLI “translates particulate pollution concentrations into their impact on lifespans” and “complements” the frequently used Air Quality Index (AQI) that does not directly map the effects of air pollution on health. So far, “studies tend to rely on data tracking people’s exposure over a short time period” but this particular tool tried to capture lifetime exposure.
The AQLI is based on data from a pair of studies — Chen et al. 2013 and Ebenstein et al. 2017 — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The 2017 study New Evidence on the Impact of Sustained Exposure to Air Pollution on Life Expectancy from China’s Huai River Policy finds “that a 10 µg/m3 increase in airborne particulate matter (PM10) reduces life expectancy by 0.64 years…”
The estimate is derived from the quasi-experimental variation in PM10 generated by the Huai policy, which provides free or heavily subsidised coal for indoor heating during the winter to cities north of the river but not to the south, according to the AQLI.
For the study, the researchers collected air pollution data for six main pollutants in 154 cities in the north and south from 1981 to 2012 with the main subject being PM10. They then linked the particulate pollution data to mortality data from 2004 to 2012 for which they used the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Disease Surveillance Points (DSP) survey, a high-quality nationally representative survey through a coverage population of more than 73 million people at 161 locations.