Health Benefits in California of Strengthening the Fine Particulate Matter Standards

Abstract

The Clean Air Act requires the United States Environmental Protection Agency to review routinely the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, including fine particulate matter (PM2.5). A non-governmental Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel recently concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not protect public health adequately and recommended revising the daily standard from 35 to 25–30 μg/m3 and the annual standard from 12 to 8–10 μg/m3. To assess the public health implications of adopting the PM2.5 standards proposed by the panel, the health benefits are quantified from their implementation based on both current (observed) and future (simulated) air quality data for California. The findings indicate that strengthening the standards would provide significant public health benefits valued at $42–$149 billion. Additionally, the stronger standards are shown to benefit environmental justice via health savings that are allocated more within environmentally and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.

Decarbonization will lead to more equitable air quality in California

“…Meteorological conditions are also kept constant in this study; because climate change is likely amplify the air quality impacts of emission mitigations 8 , we may thus be underestimating the air quality benefits of the scenarios. Finally, our epidemiological analysis only takes into account the long-term effects of PM 2.5 exposure (usually >90% of the health valuation in California 6 , 35 , 47 ), thus neglecting additional effects of other pollutants such as ground-level ozone and air toxics, this also doesn’t take into account acute effects of different pollutants.…”

“…The air quality co-benefits of different mitigation pathways were explored in Aas et al 32 , however only health impacts from episodic modeling (two weeks in summer and winter) were quantified. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, all the studies discussed here provide a cursory assessment of environmental justice (EJ) implications generally represented by the summation and comparison of total benefits within disadvantaged communities relative to the California population as a whole 35 .Therefore, a need exists for the systematic evaluation of how reshaping energy systems to reduce GHG can best provide air quality health benefits within disadvantaged communities to support policy decisions regarding technology investment and other drivers of mitigation efforts.…”