Current annual global estimates of premature deaths from poor air quality are estimated in the range of 2.6-4.4 million, and 2050 projections are expected to double against 2010 levels. In Europe, annual economic burdens are estimated at around 750 bn €. Climate change will further exacerbate air pollution burdens; therefore, a better understanding of the economic impacts on human societies has become an area of intense investigation. European research efforts have been been carried out within the MACC project series, which ran from 2005 - 2015. The outcome of this work has been integrated into a European capacity for Earth Observation, the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS). In MACC/CAMS, key pollutant concentrations are computed at the European scale and globally by employing chemically-driven advanced transport models. In GLANCE, a system model is developed for calculating the health impacts and damage costs of air pollution at different physical scales. It combines MACC/CAMS (assimilated Earth Observations, an ensemble of chemical transport models and state of the art ECWMF weather forecasting) with downscaling based on in-situ network measurements. This project develops a software toolkit in Python, based on open source libraries, to yield health and economic burden assessments. Its modular design does not restrict it to the modelled concentration fields that MACC/CAMS provides, but allows the application and integration of other data.
This project is a multidisciplinary approach which brings together leading experts from natural sciences and socioeconomic fields. GLANCE benefits the European community by contributing a novel approach to assess impacts of air quality at the local and regional levels, thus benefiting to long running EU commitments, while exploring new pathways for exploiting earth observational data.
