Urban hybriD models for AiR pollution exposure Assessment (UDARA)

Air pollution affects the health of the world's population. The WHO estimate that 3.7 million deaths are annually attributable to outdoor air pollution (6.7% of all deaths globally) and urged Member States to develop air quality monitoring systems and health registries to improve surveillance for all illnesses related to air pollution. Establishing and maintaining air quality monitoring infrastructure can be costly. Furthermore, air quality monitoring alone does not provide the basis for robust analysis of health outcomes or onward air quality management.

Health risks due to air pollution in densely-populated Indonesian urban areas are increasingly associated with transport activities, whilst forest fire emissions further exacerbate health impacts associated with air-pollution. This represents a major health concern for Indonesia with both economic and welfare implications. In order to enable effective control measures that are feasible within wider development, welfare and economic goals, much improved quantification of the exposure of the population to pollution is required. To enable such quantification, the contributions from long-range and local sources pollutants and the availability of suitable health data to the determine health impacts of pollutant exposure must be established.

The UDARA project will be a multidisciplinary collaboration between the University of Manchester and 3 Indonesian Institutions; the Institut Teknologi Bandung, National Nuclear Energy Agency of Indonesia and the University of Padjadjaran involving exposure scientists, atmospheric scientists and health scientists. The project will develop a new approach for providing reliable exposure estimates for analysing the impact of air pollution on health outcomes in Indonesian cities. It will employ a new methodology developed within the EU ESCAPE project in response to the lack of European-specific data on exposure-response relationships and the uncertainty introduced into health outcome analyses by the use of varied exposure models. ESCAPE developed standardised protocols for developing and testing LUR models, while still allowing sufficient flexibility to incorporate application specific factors. The further refinement to incorporate remote sensing and chemical transport model outputs has improved model performance in complex pollution climates such as experienced in Indonesia. The ESCAPE project involved the development of both classic and hybrid models but their performance in the sort of pollution climate seen in Indonesian urban areas has yet to be investigated.

Within UDARA, we will collect new data in Jakarta, a heavily populated city with a pollution problem dominated by urban emissions, and a second city in Sumatera substantially influenced by seasonal biomass burning. The highly spatially resolved measurements of both gaseous and particulate pollutants and data from two 3D pollution models will be used within the ESCAPE methodology to derive pollutant exposure estimates for the two cities. We will additionally conduct an evaluation of the quality and quantity of Indonesian health outcome data that can be used for subsequent future epidemiological studies.

UDARA will thereby provide a new methodology and robust basis for evaluating the health outcomes from air pollution exposure in Indonesia.

The principal beneficiaries of the research will be those responsible for public health and air pollution control in Indonesia. These include the following government departments and agencies: Ministry of Environment and Forestry (Directorate of Air Pollution Control), Ministry of Health (Directorate General of Public Health), Provincial Environmental Protection Agencies, Local Authorities, Local Environmental Agency, City Health Offices, City Transportation Office, Ministry of Transportation (Directorate General of Land Transportation), Meteorological, Volcanology and Geophysical Agency (BMKG), NGOs (KPBB, Pelangi), Clean Air Initiative (CAI) - Asia, University's Research Centres, Statistical agencies (BPS) and the Geo-Spatial Information Agency (Badan Informasi Geospasial, or BIG). Clearly the ultimate beneficiaries will be the general public of Indonesia who will benefit from the engagement of UDARA researchers with the listed stakeholders and directly through the listed outreach activities.

In countries with well-developed capacities for evaluation, the health and consequent economic impacts of exposure to atmospheric pollutants have been found to be substantial. Mitigation measures can be implemented only where data are available for assessment and compliance. UDARA will provide the capability for evaluation of air pollution exposure in Indonesia in addition to an assessment of the availability and quality of health data for effective epidemiological studies. This information will provide a powerful decision making tool, delivering the basis for the implementation of air quality control measures at local, regional and national scale. The information provided by the methodology developed within UDARA will be able to identify the optimum control measures to mitigate against adverse health outcomes in Indonesia at a range of scales.
The Directorate General of Public Health will be able to use exposure assessments and eventually the results from any resultant health outcome prediction capability as a planning tool to enable direction of resources.
The Directorate of Air Pollution Control and Provincial Environmental Protection Agencies will be able to give advice to Government to enable planning decisions and pollution control measures to be implemented.
The general public in the target cities will benefit from the knowledge of their exposure and eventually from control measures implemented through the measures above. Increased public awareness will result from the project outcomes.