Potential health and equity co-benefits related to the mitigation policies reducing air pollution from residential wood burning in Athens, Greece

Abstract

Athens, Greece has been in economic and social crises after the 2008 global recession, resulting in an increase in wood burning as a cheaper method of residential heating in the winter. Reducing wood burning emissions is a source-specific method to address air quality degradation, and indirectly climate change, through instituting policies aimed at human health co-benefits. In this work, we investigate and quantify the potential health co-benefits from policies reducing outdoor particulate matter (PM) pollution from residential wood burning by assessing the pollution conditions during the 2015 calendar year in Athens, Greece, emphasizing vulnerable populations. We conducted a systematic literature search to extract data regarding effective improvements to outdoor PM due to wood burning interventions, and get a range of potential ambient PM reduction estimates regarding realistic benefits from different interventions. We applied a health impact assessment methodology and used existing Athens specific data to calculate the preventable daily average non-accidental deaths associated with reducing PM, additionally considering low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups. We found that the reduction in outdoor PM concentration showed the potential to benefit lower SES groups as much as 13.5 times more than the high SES group, representing an opportunity for policies to improve not only the health of the total population but also improve environmental equity and health disparities.

Keywords:

• Particulate matter
• health impact assessment
• mitigation health co-benefits
• wood burning
• intervention
• environmental justice
• climate change

Acknowledgments

J.B. and E.G. would like to thank ERA-PLANET (www.era-planet.eu) and trans-national project SMURBS (www.smurbs.eu) for inspiring and supporting this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by EU Horizon 2020 Framework Program (grant agreement no. 689443) also partially funded by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRP-17-446315).