Santiago de Cali and the Metropolitan Area of Aburra Valley, both BreatheLife Network Members with air quality management plans, received technical assistance from the Climate and Clean Air Coalition’s Solution Centre to estimate the health and climate benefits of their plans. This assistance helped build capacity and promote an integrated climate, environmental and health approach for air quality planning.
The implementation, monitoring, and assessment of air quality management plans is one of the most effective ways to improve air quality at a city level. Furthermore, these plans can serve as a framework to promote actions by environmental health authorities and other sectors.
Reducing air pollution in cities can lead to important health benefits by reducing the exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and tropospheric ozone, pollutants with well-known harmful health effects. In addition, actions to reduce air pollution will also reduce short-lived climate pollutants like black carbon, methane and ozone, and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2).
Identifying and quantifying emissions by sector in an air quality management plan is key to effectively reduce such emissions. The health care system is also a major source of these pollutants, primarily due to energy consumption, travel, and procurement.
Quantified potential health and climate benefits and sectorial contributions are not always included in air quality management plans due to the limited understanding of the tools and methodologies needed to determine these.
Air quality management plans can play an increasingly important role in supporting decision making by including properly estimated health benefits from the burden of disease from air pollution, quantified short-lived climate pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions, and measurements of a health system’s carbon footprint. These estimations can help engage key stakeholders like the health sector, that are not always aware of their contribution to climate change.
The Clean Air Institute and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office for the Americas of the World Health Organization (WHO) helped estimate the burden of disease from air pollution in Cali and Aburra Valley. They organized and collected local inputs from the epidemiology surveillance system (baseline disease rates), the air quality monitoring network, and population and GIS databases. They identified relevant relative risk coefficients and dose-response functions for assessing the air pollution burden of disease in Latin American countries and helped quantify air pollution health impacts in Cali and Aburra’s Valley using AirQ+ and BenMAP-CE, tools.
They also conducted a climate benefit analysis to determine the health care system’s carbon footprint. This analysis included:
Video: Aburra Valley, Colombia Clean Air Day message
Lead Partner: A Coalition partner with an active role in coordinating, monitoring and guiding the work of an initiative.
Implementer: A Coalition partner or actor receiving Coalition funds to implement an activity or initiative.
En el marco de la implementación de la campaña BreatheLife (RespiraVida), Santiago de Cali y el Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá solicitó a la CCAC asistencia técnica para el ...
This flyer explains the multiple benefits (health, climate change, and air quality) of integrated strategies on air quality and climate action plans in Cali and Aburra Valley, Colombia (in Spanish...
This flyer compares BenMAP and AirQ+ tools and its applications for air pollution and health impact assessment.
This flyer explains the general methodology on how estimate health benefits using available tools (in Spanish).
A final workshop for the project “Estimating the Integrated Climate, Environmental and Health Benefits of Air Quality Management Plans in the Metropolitan Areas of Aburra’s Valley and Cali (...
