Air pollution is a major public health problem. A significant number of epidemiological studies have found a correlation between air quality and a wide variety of adverse health impacts emphasizing a considerable role of air pollution in the disease burden in the general population ranging from subclinical effects to premature death. Health risk assessment of air quality can play a key role at individual and global health promotion and disease prevention levels. The Air Pollution Health Risk Assessment (AP-HRA) forecasts the expected health effect of policies impacting air quality under the various policy, environmental and socio-economic circumstances, making it a key tool for guiding public policy decisions. This paper presents the concept of AP-HRA and offers an outline for the proper conducting of AP-HRA for different scenarios, explaining in broad terms how the health hazards of air emissions and their origins are measured and how air pollution-related impacts are quantified. In this paper, seven widely used AP-HRA tools will be deeply explored, taking into account their spatial resolution, technological factors, pollutants addressed, geographical scale, quantified health effects, method of classification, and operational characteristics. Finally, a comparative analysis of the proposed tools will be conducted, using the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) method.

This study aims to estimate the avoided mortalities and morbidities and related economic impacts due to adopting the nonmotorized transportation (NMT) policy in Delhi, India. To this aim, an integrated quantitative assessment framework is developed to estimate the expected environmental, health, and economic co-benefits from replacing personal motorized transport with NMT in Delhi, taking into account the inhabitants’ willingness to use NMT (walking and cycling) mode. The willingness to accept NMT is estimated by conducting a cross-sectional survey in Delhi, which is further used to estimate the expected health benefits from both increased physical activity and near-roadway-avoided PM2.5 exposure in selected traffic areas in 11 major districts in Delhi. The value of a statistical life (VSL) and cost of illness methods are used to calculate the economic benefits of the avoided mortalities and morbidities from NMT in Delhi. The willingness assessment indicates that the average per capita time spent walking and cycling in Delhi is 11.054 and 2.255 min, respectively. The results from the application of the NMT in Delhi show the annual reduction in CO2 and PM2.5 to be 121.5 kilotons and 138.9 tons, respectively. The model estimates the expected co-benefits from increased physical activities and reduced PM2.5 exposure at 17,529 avoided cases of mortality with an associated savings of about USD 4870 million in Delhi.

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Increasing the number of people who walk and bike to work is a significant step toward achieving the public health objective of increasing physical activity and decreasing urban air pollution. We examined the health and financial benefits of Delhi's policies encouraging walking and bicycling using the Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT). Encouraging active travel and public transit is excellent for the environment and public health since it increases physical activity, reduces air pollution, and emits less greenhouse gases. We assessed those 4080 premature deaths could be prevented annually because of changes in the quantity of walking and cycling and reduction in air pollution, and an annual decrease of CO2 by 722,630 tons in Delhi. The monetization of mortality and carbon emission reductions has an economic value of 955 M USD per year.