Fall Meeting 2022

December 12 - 16, 2022

The United Nations have recently declared access to a clean and sustainable environment, including to clean breathing air, as a fundamental human right, thus there is urgent need to take action for sustainable plans and management practices to protect human health from the adverse impacts associated with air pollution. New interdisciplinary approaches to understand and improve the interactions between outdoor air quality, behavior and policy to reduce population exposure to outdoor air pollution and the uncertainty in the associated health risk, and to improve public health at the urban and regional scale are thus needed.

Specifically, new statistics-based data assimilation and machine learning techniques able to incorporate observational datasets from traditional ground-based and citizen science networks, and from satellites, into high-resolution regional chemical transport model simulations and urban dispersion models now allow an improved characterization of air pollutants’ variability at fine spatio-temporal scales. Similarly, new epidemiological studies aimed at improving knowledge on the physiological response to outdoor air pollution exposure and its variation by demographic factors are needed.

Finally, as marginalized communities are often disproportionately affected by air pollution, and at times also comparatively under-monitored, more research is needed to investigate gaps in pollution, demographic, and health data for risk assessments in previously overlooked populations.