EAPSI: Examining the Long-term Health Benefits of the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Actions in Heavily Polluted Regions

该项目的总体目标是考察2013年“大气污染防治行动计划”在中国污染最严重、人口最稠密的地区之一——京津冀地区的长期健康效益。该项目将在清华大学进行，由著名空气污染研究专家王树晓博士指导。中国是开展空气污染研究的理想地点，因为它拥有丰富的可用资源，以及对该主题的政治、科学和社会兴趣。该项目将研究中国新的综合空气污染政策对健康的好处，例如减少心血管疾病或过早死亡，该政策导致PM2.5水平下降。空气污染是一个全球性的环境问题，影响着发达国家和发展中国家，并对当地的空气质量和全球气候产生影响。因此，尽管研究将在中国进行，但它将对全球社会产生影响。由于中国是空气污染的主要排放国之一，提供以下方面的可量化信息：1)现有的污染水平，2)新的空气污染政策对空气质量的预期改善，以及3)估计的健康效益，将增强国际社会对这一重要问题的普遍和科学理解。项目中有三个输入组件要使用。第一个组成部分“社区多尺度空气质量（CMAQ）输出”将估算行动计划下环境PM2.5的变化。第二，人口统计数据将从中国国家统计局收集。最后，PM2.5导致的过早死亡以及其他相关疾病结果的“浓度-反应函数（CRFs）”将从流行病学文献和专家对中国相关文献的综合中得出。CRFs将代表PM2.5变化对健康结局发生率的影响。中国目前的环境——PM2.5浓度高企、受影响人群众多、污染控制措施变化迅速——将为拟议项目的研究提供一些独特的场景。该奖项隶属于东亚和太平洋暑期学院项目，由美国国家科学基金会和中国科技部共同资助，支持美国研究生的暑期研究。

The overall objective of this project is to examine the long-term health benefits of the 2013 "Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan" in one of the most heavily polluted and populated regions in China: the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. The project will be conducted at Tsinghua University under the mentorship of Dr. Shuxiao Wang, who is a noted expert in air pollution research. China is an ideal location to conduct air pollution research because of its available and abundant resources, as well as its political, scientific, and societal interests in the topic. This project will examine the health benefits, such as reduced cardiovascular outcome or premature deaths, of China's new comprehensive air pollution policy, which has resulted in reduced PM2.5 levels. Air pollution is a global environmental issue that is affecting both developed and developing countries, and has local air quality and also global climate impacts. Therefore, even though the research will be conducted in China, it will have impacts on the global community. Because China is one of the major emitters of air pollution, providing quantifiable information on: 1) existing pollution levels, 2) expected improvements in air quality from the new air pollution policy, and 3) estimated health benefits will enhance the global community's general and scientific understanding of this important issue. There are three input components to be used in the project. The first component, "Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) output" , will have estimates of changes in ambient PM2.5 under the action plan. Second, demographic data will be collected from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. Lastly, "concentration-response functions (CRFs)" for premature death attributable to PM2.5 as well as other disease outcomes of interest will be derived from the epidemiological literature and expert syntheses of literature relevant to China. CRFs will represent the effect of changes in PM2.5 on health outcome incidence of interest. China's current circumstance - highly elevated PM2.5 concentrations, a large number of affected individuals, and rapidly changing pollution control measures - will offer some unique scenarios to investigate under the proposed project.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.