Journal of Air Pollution and Health
Volume:6 Issue: 2, Spring 2021

Land transportation encompasses the movement of people and goods and is therefore a major contributor of global greenhouses gases. The main share of such emissions is mostly from the release of carbon dioxide into the air as a result of burning transportation fuels obtained from petroleum, a major driver of climate change. While today the defining issue is a changing climate, the number of vehicles on roads keep on rising around the world.

This study assessed the relationship between land transportation and climate change using a system dynamics model based on a 3-layered taxonomy using Mauritius Island as case study. Over 100 papers were analyzed and the variables that link land transportation and climate change in the Mauritian context were selected and a taxonomy divided into sub-units was built.

This innovative taxonomy was divided into 3 sections related to the land transportation sector including a vehicle layer, transport system layer and society layer. Using these variables, three stock and flow diagrams were constructed on Vensim, namely climate change impacts, transport related carbon dioxide and socio-economic models.

While there is a complex relationship between land transportation and climate change globally, Mauritius must find ways to become more climate friendly in the land transportation sector.

One of the effects of air pollution in the community was increasing mortality rate. Determination of contamination was the first step in improving the existing conditions. Therefore, the way of pollutants distribution and the timing and spatial changes were important. This study aimed to evaluate the risk of Parental Emissions (PE) of Isfahan steel company using AERMOD.

In this research, the distribution of suspended particles of the Isfahan steel company were modeled in the AERMOD for 1 h, 24 h and yearly average (30×30 km2 ), then the comparison of the average concentrations modeled with air standards clean country and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regional risk maps were provided in Arc GIS.

The prediction of the distribution of 24-h mean concentrations indicated that the maximum value for the 24-h average was equal to 8.52 EPA and 25.25 times, the standard Iran's clean air. Also, the prediction of the distribution of average annual concentrations indicated that the maximum value for the average annual time was 91.1 times, the EPA standard and 4.78% higher than Iran's clean air standard.

Health risk maps show that the risk spot was not regional in the direction of the region's wind and topography of the region was the main factor in the distribution of risky spots in the region. Legitimate use of the AERMOD could be useful in managing, controlling, and evaluating air pollutants especially in industrial units of the country.

This study provides a scientometric analysis of the health impact assessment within AirQ between 2005 and 2019, which are listed in the web science databases. Studies have been conducted in various indexed journals, researchers in World Health Organization (WHO) regional areas on product articles, international collaboration, and citation and keyword analysis.

Bibliographic records of research publications and articles were found and after screening process were input to study plan. The authors compared the growth of article that was published in this period time, conducted a citation and co-authorship analysis, and keywords co-occurrences relationship by publication using the scientometric visualization, VOSviewer.

The AirQ applying tool in research literature has seen most increase in 2017 production over the study period. Contributions by authors affiliated with WHO-Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) account for the most research literature. Most of studies focus on particles Particulate Matter with diameter <10 µm (PM10) and Particulate Matter with diameter <2.5µm (PM2.5) and according to total mortality and in hospital admission, Respiratory Disease (RD) and Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD) are most commonly.

All potential of AirQ has not been used in studies. Despite all function its scope is limited to several countries in the WHO regions. Implementation of “Driving Force, Pressure, State, Exposure, Effect, and Action” (DPSEEA) conceptual model need some evidence that AirQ can achieve and estimate Health Impact Assessment (HIA) but we didn’t find any articles that work on intervention by it on policy makers and management programs.

The impacts of building layout on pedestrian level wind comfort and gas pollutant diffusion are simulated using computational fluid dynamics method.

The control equations of flow and pollutant diffusion are solved by using ANSYS Fluent. The SIMPLE algorithm is selected for the pressure-velocity coupling. The data from wind tunnel experiment at Tokyo Polytechnic University is employed in the validation case.

The velocity field and turbulence intensity at pedestrian level under different building layouts are obtained. The distribution and evaluation of wind comfort grade and pollutant concentration are given.

Building layouts have significant impacts on flow and pollutant diffusion at pedestrian level. The outward staggered layout of building group can improve both wind comfort grade and air quality, but the inward staggered layout has the adverse effect. Non-staggered layouts are the worst in terms of the wind comfort grade in this paper.

Particulate Matter (PM), also known as aerosol, is the sum of all particles suspended in droplets floating in the air, which can have harmful impacts on humans all over the world. This cross-sectional study set out to evaluate the potential health effects of over-exposure to PM10 and PM2.5 on aggravating mortality and hospitalization due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases among Arak citizens.

In this cross-sectional survey, AirQ+ model was used to estimate the health impacts of two particulate air pollutants (PM10 and PM2.5) based on Relative Risk (RR), and Baseline Incidence (BI) obtained from reference documents.

According to the calculations, the attributable proportion percentage (AP%) and attributable excess cases (persons) for total mortality from PM10 were 3.3% (95% CI, 2.8%-3.8%) in 2014 vs. 4.9% (95% CI, 4.1%-5.6%) in 2015 and 99 persons in 2014 vs. 148 persons in 2015, respectively. Likewise, the AP (%) and the number of excess cases (persons) calculated for total mortality from PM2.5 were 3.3% (95% CI, 2.6%-4.1%) in 2014 vs. 1.1% (95% CI, 0.8%-1.3%) in 2015 and 99 persons in 2014 vs. 33 persons in 2015, respectively.

In this study, it was found that dominant west winds could increase the particle matters produced from power plants, petrochemical plants, and western dust storm, leading to a surge in the mortality and morbidity related to particulate air pollutants in Arak.

Today, 25% of diseases in the world are directly or indirectly caused by environmental problems. The present study attempts to clarify physicians’ moral responsibility in this regard and the roles they can play to decrease environmental problems. It also evaluates their attitudes towards and performance of these roles. The clarification of this issue paves the way for interventions through effective education or policy-making, as well as directing useful research.

A questionnaire was developed based on the results of qualitive study. The questionnaire assessed physicians’ awareness, attitude, and performance with regard to their environmental moral responsibilities.

Physicians with longer work experience had better performance. Those who worked in offices or at universities had also better performances compared to those working in hospitals. Physicians with more awareness had better performance, especially those who had acquired this awareness through books and educational workshops. The source of information was an effective factor on the gap between physicians’ attitude and performance scores those who had acquired information from books had the narrowest gap and those who had received information from social networks had the widest gap between attitude and performance scores.

The health system and the environment and its problems are intertwined and greatly influence each other. Thus this interrelation and the necessity of being concerned and having moral sensitivity were explained.