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New tools can guide US policies to better target and reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in air pollution exposure.

Purpose of reviewIncreasing wildfire size and severity across the western United States has created an environmental and social crisis that must be approached from a transdisciplinary perspective. Climate change and more than a century of fire exclusion and wildfire suppression have led to contemporary wildfires with more severe environmental impacts and human smoke exposure. Wildfires increase smoke exposure for broad swaths of the US population, though outdoor workers and socially disadvantaged groups with limited adaptive capacity can be disproportionally exposed. Exposure to wildfire smoke is associated with a range of health impacts in children and adults, including exacerbation of existing respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, worse birth outcomes, and cardiovascular events. Seasonally dry forests in Washington, Oregon, and California can benefit from ecological restoration as a way to adapt forests to climate change and reduce smoke impacts on affected communities.Recent findingsEach wildfire season, large smoke events, and their adverse impacts on human health receive considerable attention from both the public and policymakers. The severity of recent wildfire seasons has state and federal governments outlining budgets and prioritizing policies to combat the worsening crisis. This surging attention provides an opportunity to outline the actions needed now to advance research and practice on conservation, economic, environmental justice, and public health interests, as well as the trade-offs that must be considered. Scientists, planners, foresters and fire managers, fire safety, air quality, and public health practitioners must collaboratively work together. This article is the result of a series of transdisciplinary conversations to find common ground and subsequently provide a holistic view of how forest and fire management intersect with human health through the impacts of smoke and articulate the need for an integrated approach to both planning and practice.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution exposure is the largest environmental health risk factor in the United States. Here, we link PM2.5 exposure to the human activities responsible for PM2.5 pollution. We use these results to explore "pollution inequity": the difference between the environmental health damage caused by a racial-ethnic group and the damage that group experiences. We show that, in the United States, PM2.5 exposure is disproportionately caused by consumption of goods and services mainly by the non-Hispanic white majority, but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic minorities. On average, non-Hispanic whites experience a "pollution advantage": They experience ∼17% less air pollution exposure than is caused by their consumption. Blacks and Hispanics on average bear a "pollution burden" of 56% and 63% excess exposure, respectively, relative to the exposure caused by their consumption. The total disparity is caused as much by how much people consume as by how much pollution they breathe. Differences in the types of goods and services consumed by each group are less important. PM2.5 exposures declined ∼50% during 2002-2015 for all three racial-ethnic groups, but pollution inequity has remained high.

Air quality models can support pollution mitigation design by simulating policy scenarios and conducting source contribution analyses. The Intervention Model for Air Pollution (InMAP) is a powerful tool for equitable policy design as its variable resolution grid enables intra‐urban analysis, the scale of which most environmental justice inquiries are levied. However, InMAP underestimates particulate sulfate and overestimates particulate ammonium formation, errors that limit the model's relevance to city‐scale decision‐making. To reduce InMAP's biases and increase its relevancy for urban‐scale analysis, we calculate and apply scaling factors (SFs) based on observational data and advanced models. We consider both satellite‐derived speciated PM2.5 from Washington University and ground‐level monitor measurements from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, applied with different scaling methodologies. Relative to ground‐monitor data, the unscaled InMAP model fails to meet a normalized mean bias performance goal of <±10% for most of the PM2.5 components it simulates (pSO4: −48%, pNO3: 8%, pNH4: 69%), but with city‐specific SFs it achieves the goal benchmarks for every particulate species. Similarly, the normalized mean error performance goal of <35% is not met with the unscaled InMAP model (pSO4: 53%, pNO3: 52%, pNH4: 80%) but is met with the city‐scaling approach (15%–27%). The city‐specific scaling method also improves the R2 value from 0.11 to 0.59 (ranging across particulate species) to the range of 0.36–0.76. Scaling increases the percent pollution contribution of electric generating units (EGUs) (nationwide 4%) and non‐EGU point sources (nationwide 6%) and decreases the agriculture sector's contribution (nationwide −6%). Plain Language Summary: Air quality models can support the design of pollution reduction strategies by assessing sources of pollution and simulating policy scenarios. The Intervention Model for Air Pollution (InMAP) is an air quality model that can evaluate fine particulate matter (PM2.5) differences within cities, which makes it valuable as tool to assess equity of PM2.5 exposure. However, InMAP's simplified atmospheric chemistry equations results in errors that limit the model's relevance to city‐scale decision‐making. To reduce the model's biases and errors, we calculate and apply SFs based on observational data and advanced models, specifically ground‐level monitor measurements from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a satellite‐derived data product. We find that applying SFs derived from satellite observations over cities or individual grid‐cells improves model performance. Scaling InMAP affects the source contribution analysis nationwide and for individual cities, specifically by increasing the contribution of power plants and industry and decreasing the contribution of the agriculture sector. Key Points: Applying scaling factors determined with satellite‐derived PM2.5 makes the Intervention Model for Air Pollution (InMAP) model suitable and relevant for urban‐scale analysisRelative to standard InMAP data, we find higher contributions of electric generating unit (EGU) and non‐EGU point sources to U.S. citiesRelative to standard InMAP data, we find lower contributions of the agricultural emissions to U.S. cities [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution levels in the United States have decreased dramatically over the past decades, yet national racial-ethnic exposure disparities persist. For ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), we investigate three emission-reduction approaches and compare their optimal ability to address two goals: 1) reduce the overall population average exposure ("overall average") and 2) reduce the difference in the average exposure for the most exposed racial-ethnic group versus for the overall population ("national inequalities"). We show that national inequalities in exposure can be eliminated with minor emission reductions (optimal: ~1% of total emissions) if they target specific locations. In contrast, achieving that outcome using existing regulatory strategies would require eliminating essentially all emissions (if targeting specific economic sectors) or is not possible (if requiring urban regions to meet concentration standards). Lastly, we do not find a trade-off between the two goals (i.e., reducing overall average and reducing national inequalities); rather, the approach that does the best for reducing national inequalities (i.e., location-specific strategies) also does as well as or better than the other two approaches (i.e., sector-specific and meeting concentration standards) for reducing overall averages. Overall, our findings suggest that incorporating location-specific emissions reductions into the US air quality regulatory framework 1) is crucial for eliminating long-standing national average exposure disparities by race-ethnicity and 2) can benefit overall average exposures as much as or more than the sector-specific and concentration-standards approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]