Air Quality Risk Index (AQRI) and its application for a megacity

Abstract

Urban air quality is a major concern throughout the world. The concentration of human activities in a relatively small area puts enormous pressure on urban systems and has led to numerous environmental problems which have created major problems for urban air quality management. The complex nature of air pollution, especially with respect to health impacts in urban areas, has prompted attempts to define the so-called indicators that condense and simplify the available monitoring data to make them suitable for public reporting and decision makers. Several concepts and indicators exist to measure and rank urban areas in terms of their infrastructural, socioeconomic and environment-related parameters. In past four decades different indices have been introduced, such as Pollutant Standards Index, Air Quality Index (AQI), Air Quality Health Index and Aggregate Risk Index, but none of them have considered importance of the integrated health, environment and safety factors relevant to the extended risk factors involved, such as diverse economic losses and negative socioeconomic aspects. Therefore an integrated AQI, so-called, Air Quality Risk Index which considers environmental conditions, and economic losses involved were applied for the city of Tehran as a megacity. The results indicated that this index can be applied to define the actual condition(s) of urban air quality and to achieve sustainability and resiliency.

Air quality health indices - review

“…Next step was taking into account different number of population in the cities and levels of exposure to pollution, it was done according to equation (11): (11) where MWED is mortality weighted excess deaths (%), β i is the i regression coefficient from model, that links i pollutant with mortality, x i,j,t is the concentration of i pollutant in the j city at the t hour corresponding to maximum daily excess mortality, n is the number of cities and m j is the daily average number of deaths in j city. Next step was to get the maximum number of deaths attributable to air pollution to make a 10 value AQHI, which is described in equation (12): (12) where q is number of days, and c is the maximum mortality weighted excess deaths. From that, the general index formula is design, and presented in equation (13): (13) where i is the regression coefficient, that links i pollutant with mortality, p is the number of pollutants, and c is the scaling factor, which is the maximum mortality weighted excess deaths.…”

“…Very well recognized AQHI can be added with a new variable. Researchers have developed Air Quality Risk Index (AQRI) [12]. It is based on standard AQHI approach with the addition of safety risk (damage and loses) and environment.…”

A bibliometric-based evaluation on environmental research in the Arab world

“…Additionally, these problems have featured hugely in scientific publications and warnings (Tolba and Saab 2009). Such problems that have been hugely addressed in the literature include, as an examples, air pollution (Ahmadi et al 2015;Li et al 2016a), climatic changes (Carleton and Hsiang 2016; Deutsch et al 2015), industrial effluents (Padmanaban et al 2016), desertification (Juřička et al 2016;Li et al 2016b), vulnerability of groundwater to external pollutants (Damak et al 2016;Iqbal et al 2014), land degradation (Akhtar-Schuster et al 2016;Kosmas et al 2016) and aquatic environment pollution with organic and inorganic pollutants (Shakeri et al 2015).…”

Resilient cities, a key solution to safeguard the environment

“…However, there are de ned indices that determine the quality of each of these factors for sustainability and resiliency. For a case like air, presently several indices can be used such as AQI, AQHI, AQRI [12], or for the case of noise, there are several standards such as US Environmental Protection Agency (US.EPA) noise pollution standards; of course there are national and international regulations for di erent regions.…”