Health Costs of Traffic-Related Air Pollution
Project Description
In preparation for the Transport Environment and Health Session of the WHO Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health, held in London in June 1999, a tri-lateral project was carried out by Austria, France and Switzerland. This project assessed the health costs of road traffic-related air pollution in the three countries using a common methodological framework. In this project, information about air pollution related effects on human health and the share of traffic-related air pollution was assessed by integrating data on air pollution, epidemiology and economy. For the three countries, the exposure of the residential population to PM10 was assessed and the results presented as a fine register defining the population's exposure by concentration classes. The epidemiologic relationship between air pollution and health established the extent to which different levels of air pollution affect a population's morbidity and mortality. By combining the exposure to PM10 in each country with the exposure-response relationship, the impacts of traffic-related air pollution was quantified in terms of additional cases of premature death and number and type of additional cases of morbidity. Monetarisation of these effects was based on the willingness-to-pay approach for each health outcome separately. In all three countries the air pollution related health effects are far from being negligible. One third of the air pollution is caused by road transport and in the cities the percentage is considerably higher (up to 50%). All three countries together bear some 49,700 million EURO ($US53,000 million) of air pollution related health costs, of which some 26,700 million EURO ($US28,460 million) are road-traffic related. The per capita costs are very similar across all three countries and amount to an average of 360 EURO ($US380) per capita per year.
