Urban air pollution exposure: an assessment exploiting world settlement footprint and land use data

The majority of the population in Europe that is exposed to air pollution levels exceeding the WHO limit values lives in metropolitan areas. There are already several studies that assess the linkage between air pollution and adverse effects on health. With the technology at our disposition, today, we can identify air pollution hotspots. The assessment of the pollution situation alone represents, however, only one component of the whole picture. In order to be able to build a scale that identifies the most critical regions in higher need of intervention, also the probability of exposure and the number of people exposed to defined pollution concentrations must be considered. For this purpose, we can benefit from satellite-derived data products of settlement extent, population density and land use. To improve the health risk assessment, novel data sets have been synergistically exploited for the first time. In this work a method is proposed to perform an assessment of the increased health risk within urban areas in Europe due to the exposure to PM2.5 and to calculate the health burden index HBI: a useful parameter for the assessment of health risk that provides a measure of the impact of air pollution and enables to perform comparisons between different cities. This is a first approach showing the potential of this easily scalable tool that can be of support in the decision-making process and in the research on air pollution/health relationship. Further work is required for the verification and tuning of the initial hypotheses by means of validation with real-life data.