New WHO global air quality guidelines help prevent premature deaths in China

Tao Xue; Guannan Geng; Xia Meng; Qingyang Xiao; Yixuan Zheng; Jicheng Gong; Jun Liu; Wei Wan; Qiang Zhang; Haidong Kan; Shiqiu Zhang; Tong Zhu

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwac055

New WHO global air quality guidelines help prevent premature deaths in China

Natl Sci Rev. 2022 Mar 23;9(4):nwac055. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwac055. eCollection 2022 Apr.

Authors

Tao Xue¹, Guannan Geng², Xia Meng³, Qingyang Xiao², Yixuan Zheng⁴, Jicheng Gong⁵, Jun Liu⁶, Wei Wan⁷, Qiang Zhang⁸, Haidong Kan³, Shiqiu Zhang⁵, Tong Zhu⁵

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Reproductive and Child Health / National Health Commission Key Laboratory of Reproductive Health and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Peking University, China.
² State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, China.
³ School of Public Health, Key Laboratory of Public Health Safety of the Ministry of Education, and Key Laboratory of Health Technology Assessment of the Ministry of Health, Fudan University, China.
⁴ Center of Air Quality Simulation and System Analysis, Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, China.
⁵ College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, China.
⁶ School of Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, China.
⁷ Clean Air Asia, China.
⁸ Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, China.

Abstract

The World Health Organization has issued new air quality guidelines (AQG). Based on 2020 data, achieving the new AQG for PM2.5 could prevent an additional 285,000 chronic deaths and 13,000 acute deaths, across China, compared with the previous AQG. The new AQG can better protect health but cannot be achieved without coordinated air-pollution-control and climate-mitigation efforts.