Health Risk Assessment of Air Pollution: assessing the environmental burden of disease in Europe in 2021. ETC HE Report 2023/7.

• Main Authors: Soares, Joana, Plass, Dietrich, Kienzler, Sarah, Ortiz, Alberto González, Gsella, Artur, Horálek, Jan
• Other Authors: Schucht, Simone, Spadaro, Joseph V., Wintermeyer, Dirk
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Ambient air pollution; Environmental Burden of Disease; Mortality; Morbidity; attributable deaths; Year of life lost; YLL; Years lived with disability; YLD; disability-adjusted life years; DALY; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10592470

This report presents the results of the environmental burden of disease (or health risk) assessment related to air pollution in 2021. The estimates include all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality and morbidity health outcomes, with ten risk-outcome pairs considered for the cause-specific estimates. Cause-specific mortality and morbidity estimates are combined to allow assessing the overall impact on population health based on a common indicator, the disability-adjusted life year. Using estimates disaggregated by mortality and morbidity components allows for the identification of the related shares across European countries. This report presents the results of the environmental burden of disease (EBD) assessment related to air pollution in 2021 for the 27 Member States of the European Union and an additional 14 European countries (Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Kosovo under UNSCR 1244/99, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, and Türkiye). The estimations differentiate the EBD by three individual pollutants, fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), and ozone (O 3 ), considering all-cause mortality as well as cause-specific mortality and morbidity. For the analyses, various burden of disease indicators were used, such as attributable deaths (AD), years of life lost (YLL), years lived with disability (YLD), disability-adjusted life years (DALY) and attributable hospitalisation cases. In 2021, long-term exposure to concentration levels above the WHO Air Quality Guideline levels of PM 2.5 and NO 2 , resulted in 293 000 and 69 000 AD from all natural causes, respectively. There were 27 000 AD related to short-term exposure to O 3 . For EU27, the number of AD is 253 000, 52 000 and 22 000, respectively. When considering both the number of deaths and the age at which it occurs, the YLL (YLL per 100 000 inhabitants) is 2 936 000 (618) for long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and 740 000 (132) to NO 2 , and 299 000 (54) due to ...