Source sector and fuel contributions to ambient PM2.5 and attributable mortality across multiple spatial scales

Erin E Mcduffie,Melanie S Hammer,Steven J Smith,Jintai Lin,Liam Bindle,Aaron Van Donkelaar,Jamiu A Adeniran,Fangqun Yu,Patrick O’Rourke,Randall V Martin,Viral Shah,Michael Brauer,Lyatt Jaeglé,Richard Burnett,Gan Luo,Joseph V Spadaro

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-23853-y

Abstract

Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the world’s leading environmental health risk factor. Reducing the PM2.5 disease burden requires specific strategies that target dominant sources across multiple spatial scales. We provide a contemporary and comprehensive evaluation of sector- and fuel-specific contributions to this disease burden across 21 regions, 204 countries, and 200 sub-national areas by integrating 24 global atmospheric chemistry-transport model sensitivity simulations, high-resolution satellite-derived PM2.5 exposure estimates, and disease-specific concentration response relationships. Globally, 1.05 (95% Confidence Interval: 0.74–1.36) million deaths were avoidable in 2017 by eliminating fossil-fuel combustion (27.3% of the total PM2.5 burden), with coal contributing to over half. Other dominant global sources included residential (0.74 [0.52–0.95] million deaths; 19.2%), industrial (0.45 [0.32–0.58] million deaths; 11.7%), and energy (0.39 [0.28–0.51] million deaths; 10.2%) sectors. Our results show that regions with large anthropogenic contributions generally had the highest attributable deaths, suggesting substantial health benefits from replacing traditional energy sources.

Highlights

In this work, we couple emission sensitivity simulations using the GEOS-Chem 3D global chemical transport model with newly available high-resolution (1 km × 1 km) satellite-derived PM2.5 exposure estimates[43], national-level baseline burden data, and updated concentration-response functions (CRFs) from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease (GBD)[1]. We use these data and methods to quantify the relative contributions from 24 individual emission sectors and fuel categories to annual population-weighted mean (PWM) PM2.5 mass concentrations and the attributable disease burden across 21 world regions, 204 countries, and 200 sub-national areas
We find that over 1 million (27.3%) attributable deaths were avoidable by eliminating PM2.5 mass associated with emissions from fossil-fuel combustion
These results add to the growing evidence of the public health benefit achievable from global decarbonization strategies[53]

Summary

Results

We couple emission sensitivity simulations using the GEOS-Chem 3D global chemical transport model with newly available high-resolution (1 km × 1 km) satellite-derived PM2.5 exposure estimates[43], national-level baseline burden data, and updated CRFs from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease (GBD)[1] We use these data and methods to quantify the relative contributions from 24 individual emission sectors and fuel categories to annual population-weighted mean (PWM) PM2.5 mass concentrations and the attributable disease burden across 21 world regions, 204 countries (defined in Supplementary Table 1), and 200 sub-national areas. The global ambient PM2.5 disease burden was estimated by integrating national-level annual PWM PM2.5 concentrations with CRFs49 and national baseline data consistent with the 2019 GBD1 (GBD2019 CRF) These updated CRFs better reflect the uncertainty of health effects at high PM2.5 concentrations.

Discussion

Methods

Code availability