Air Quality Life Assessment Tool

Poor air quality is the largest environmental health risk in England. In the West Midlands, 2.9 million people are affected by air pollution with an average loss in life expectancy of 6 months. The 2021 Environment Act established a legal framework for local authorities to develop regional air quality plans, generating a need for predictive environmental impact assessment tools. In this context, we developed a novel Air Quality Lifecourse Assessment Tool (AQ-LAT) to estimate ward-level impacts of PM2.5 and NO2 exposure on outcomes of interest to local authorities, namely morbidity (asthma, coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, lung cancer), mortality, and associated healthcare costs.