Estimates of ozone concentrations and attributable mortality in urban, peri-urban and rural areas worldwide in 2019

Abstract

City-level estimates of ambient ozone concentrations and associated disease burdens are sparsely available, especially for low and middle-income countries. Recently available high-resolution gridded global ozone concentration estimates allow for estimating ozone concentrations and mortality at urban scales and for urban-rural catchment areas worldwide. We applied existing fine resolution global surface ozone estimates, developed by integrating observations (8,834 sites globally) with nine atmospheric chemistry models, in an epidemiologically-derived health impact function to estimate chronic respiratory disease mortality worldwide in 2019. We compared ozone season daily maximum 8 hour mixing ratio concentrations and ozone-attributable mortality for urban areas worldwide (including cities and densely-populated towns), and their surrounding peri-urban, peri-rural, and rural areas. In 2019, population-weighted mean ozone among all urban-rural catchment areas was greatest in peri-urban areas (52 ppb), followed by urban areas (cities and towns; 49 ppb). Of 423,100 estimated global ozone-attributable deaths, 37% (147,100) occurred in urban areas, where 40% of the world’s population resides, and 56% (254,000) occurred in peri-urban areas (<1 hour from an urban area), where 47% of the world’s population resides. Across 12,946 cities (excluding towns), average population-weighted mean ozone was 51 ppb [sd=13 ppb, range=10–78 ppb]. Three quarters of the ozone-attributable deaths worldwide (77%; 112,700) occurred in cities of South and East Asia. City-level ozone-attributable mortality rates varied by a factor of 10 across world regions. Ozone levels and attributable mortality were greatest in Asian and African cities; however, cities of higher-income regions, like high-income Asia Pacific and North America, continue to experience high ozone concentrations and attributable mortality rates, despite successful national air quality measures for reducing ozone precursor emissions. The disproportionate magnitude of ozone mortality compared with population size in peri-urban areas indicates that reducing ozone precursor emissions in places that influence peri-urban concentrations can yield substantial health benefits in these areas.

Increased tropospheric ozone levels as a public health issue during COVID-19 lockdown and estimation the related pulmonary diseases

“…Previous studies e.g., in Beijing ( Li et al, 2019 ), Isfahan ( Abdolahnejad et al, 2018 ), Nice and Rome ( Sicard et al, 2019 ), Suwon ( Jeong, 2013 ), Hainan ( Li et al, 2020a ), Catalonia ( Rovira et al, 2020 ), Shiraz ( Bonyadi et al, 2020 ), Cape Town ( Adebayo-Ojo et al, 2022 ), Kuwait ( Al-Hemoud et al, 2021 ), and Paris ( Filleul et al, 2006 ) have reported an increased rate of mortality and morbidity for exposure to the O 3 . The chronic exposure to the O 3 levels led to 147,100 deaths within 13,000 cities in the world in 2019 ( Malashock et al, 2022 ). The number of premature deaths due to O 3 exposure increased by 0.55 deaths per 10 6 people in the Europe Union in 2000–2017 ( Stafoggia et al, 2022 ).…”

Sources of air pollution-related health impacts and benefits of radially applied transportation policies in 14 US cities

“…To perform the population-weighting we use the Gridded Population of the World version 4 (GPWv4) product (Center for International Earth Science Information Network -CIESIN -Columbia University, 2017). In our previous study we applied a mask corresponding to the district boundaries of Washington, DC; in this work we have applied masks derived from the Global Human Settlement (GHS) Settlement Model Grid (SMOD) (Florczyk et al, 2019) dataset consistent with recent health impact assessments (Anenberg et al, 2022;Malashock et al, 2022;Southerland et al, 2022) to define the city boundaries for each of the 14 study cities. These masks define the city extent beyond the municipal boundaries and are more representative of the metropolitan area.…”

Historical transboundary ozone health impact linked to affluence

“…Ozone in the surface air is estimated to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year through worsening respiratory and cardiovascular diseases [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Formed from emitted precursor gases such as nitrogen oxides (NO x ) and nonmethane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) through highly nonlinear photochemistry, with a tropospheric lifetime of a few weeks, ozone can be transported long distances to other regions to exert transboundary impacts [11,12].…”