Assessing air quality with regards to its effect on human health in the European Union through air quality indices

Abstract

This paper focuses on the assessment of the air quality with regards to its effects on human health at 14 monitoring stations in 8 EU Countries through two different Air Quality Index methodologies. Specifically, hourly values of SO2, CO, NO2, O3 and PM10 are used to calculate the PI and API indices. The analysis reveals that, although CO and SO2 do not form a public health hazard at the sites studied, in terms of NO2 the percentages of “low pollution” days are more than 65%, while a number of stations present significant percentages of “moderate pollution” (up to 33%) and “unhealthy conditions for sensitive groups” (up to 1.5%). Regarding PM10, “moderate pollution” days reach 36.5%, whereas another 0.5% of the days are found to be “unhealthy for sensitive groups” in some areas. It is also found that when examining the combined effect of all 5 above-mentioned pollutants, roughly 50–75% of the days present moderate risk of increased mortality, whereas in some areas high risk is observed in more than 35% of the days. Furthermore, some areas present significant percentages (up to 9%) of days with very high risk of increased mortality (i.e. more than 15.3%). Finally, it is found that the CO and SO2 contribution to the risk of increased total mortality is relatively low at all stations, while the O3 and NO2 contributions are quite variable (13–52% and 11–50%, respectively) depending mainly on the type of station. On the other hand, the PM10 contribution is rather uniform at all stations (approximately 30%), suggesting that PM10 forms a homogeneous air quality stressor in the EU.