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.