Air Pollution and Health Burden in India Quantified Using the AEIM-India Emission Inventory

Le résumé fourni par la source

Air pollution poses severe problems in South Asia. A key requirement for robust air pollution modeling and thus for designing mitigation strategies is detailed, up-to-date emission inventories capturing nation-specific source characteristics. Aiming to address this need, the AEIM India Emission of Air Pollutants Air Quality (AEIM-India) inventory was recently developed. Here, we use AEIM-India year 2018 emissions of anthropogenic pollutants as the input to a state-of-the-art chemical transport model to evaluate atmospheric concentrations of aerosols and ozone over South Asia, compared to observations and simulations using the Community Emission Data System (CEDS) inventory. We find that using AEIM-India yields realistic air pollution distributions with improvements compared to simulations with CEDS, particularly during the winter and spring in highly polluted regions. The mostly higher Indian emissions in AEIM-India than CEDS result in 10% higher annual, area-average aerosol optical depth, with higher values for individual aerosol burdens, and 30% higher population-weighted PM 2.5 surface concentration (locally up to 60%), translating to 5–8% higher number of excess deaths. We highlight that fine sectoral resolution can give source attribution information for more targeted mitigation and recommend further studies of air pollution impacts in South Asia using AEIM-India, including comparative studies with other inventories to better understand differences.

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