The impact of urban climate change policies on health under financial crisis conditions - the city of Thessaloniki

摘要

Background In Thessaloniki (Northern Greece), while in the past, air pollution was credited to traffic, nowadays domestic heating is more significant, due to the reduced traffic volumes and the shift to biomass use for domestic heating. The latter is the combined result of a climate change policy - allowing the use of biomass burning for heating in Thessaloniki- and a financial crisis consequence which is the increase of liquid fuels taxation. Aims An integrated methodological framework was developed, for assessing the combined effects of financial crisis and climate change policies. Methods Using series of indoor and outdoor measurements, coupled with a traffic dispersion model (OSPM), ambient air quality is assessed for years 2010, 2011 and 2012. Ambient air concentrations of major regulated pollutants (PM10, PM2.5, NO2, CO and benzene) are used as input to the state-of-the-art computational platform INTERA, for assessing overall population exposure. The later allows us to incorporate the combined effects of outdoor air penetration, the presence of indoor sources (e.g. fireplaces, stoves, smoking), the housing conditions (residences volumes, air exchange rate) and the respective time activity patterns of the exposed population. Health impact assessment (attributed mortality and morbidity) is carried out using well-established exposure-response functions. Results The traffic component was stronger the previous years, while a small increase in air pollution was observed during winter. On the contrary, in year 2012, traffic component is reduced and a significant increase of air pollution levels is observed during the winter, attributed to the miss-use of biomass burning (open fireplaces, unspecified fire-woods and pellets). As a result, during the wintertime, air pollution attributed mortality is increased up to 40%. Conclusions The miss-use of a climate change policy coupled to a financial crisis, might result to significant increase of the population health burden.