Deriving a global infant mortality pollution response curve for developing countries
Abstract
In recent years, poor air quality has become recognized as one of the leading global health risks, with particularly severe adverse effects thought to occur in developing countries. According to the Global burden of disease, mortality costs of particulate matter (PM) can be higher by up to 60-70% in developing countries. However, due to lack of reliable air quality and health data, our understanding of health impacts from pollution in developing countries are largely informed by relationships estimated in wealthy countries, which may not be representative due to differences in pollution sources, living conditions, and access to healthcare among other factors. Estimating pollution exposure responses is further complicated by the fact that, in many cases, local economic activity changes both air quality and the health profile of local populations, potentially confounding estimates of mortality risk. Here we address these joint challenges by combining global satellite derived estimates of particulate matter exposure with survey data covering more than 5.6 million births across 56 developing countries, and by employing an instrumental variable modeling approach which exploits variation in PM exposure caused by flexibly modeled changes in wind patterns. This variation is plausibly unrelated to child health except through its impact on pollution levels, and offers a quasi-experimental approach to isolating infant mortality responses from changes in local air quality. Finally we characterize heterogeneous effects using the detailed set of individual, family, and village covariates collected in the surveys combined with machine learning inference algorithms. Our estimates represent the most comprehensive estimates of global mortality risk from pollution in developing countries that are not extrapolated from wealthy country data. Moreover, our heterogeneity analysis allows us to identify important mediators of pollution-health risk and provides insight into potential policy mechanisms that could be used to mitigate mortality impacts from pollution.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMA111.0009H
- Keywords:
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- 0478 Pollution: urban;
- regional and global;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGE