RI-URBANS - health pilots

The RI-URBANS project (Research Infrastructures Services Reinforcing Air Quality Monitoring Capacities in European Urban & Industrial AreaS) aims to demonstrate how atmospheric Research Infrastructures can be adapted and enhanced to better address the challenges and societal needs concerning air quality in European cities and industrial hotspots (https://riurbans.eu/).

Within the RI-URBANS health pilots, we aim at validating measurement techniques and approaches to assess health effects by complementing existing air quality policies with measures directly targeting novel air quality metrics and health-relevant emission sources. In a first step, an epidemiological evaluation of the health effects of the novel air quality metrics will be performed. This effort will take advantage of available long time series of particle number size distributions of nanoparticles, chemical particulate matter speciation to evaluate their health short-term effects and compare these against the source contributions for both nanoparticles and particulate matter. In a second step, we will evaluate the oxidative potential of particulate matter components and source contributions from novel pilot city data in order to evaluate long-term variations. Chemical analyses will be available offline and online to compare oxidative potential with particulate matter components. The wide spatial coverage (Athens, Barcelona, Paris, Zurich) will help assess the impact of particulate matter, oxidative potential, and nanoparticles sources that are abundant only in some regions in Europe.