Health impact assessment of air pollution: AirQ+ life table manual (2020)

AirQ+ is a software tool for quantifying the health burden and impact of air pollution developed by the WHO Regional Office for Europe. AirQ+ includes methodologies to assess the impacts of short- and long-term exposure to ambient air pollution. The main methodologies use evidence generated by epidemiological cohort studies showing a relationship between average long-term air pollution concentration levels and the mortality risks in exposed populations. Assessing the impact of air pollution is suggested when evaluating the consequences of policies and interventions or of hypothetical scenarios. AirQ+ should always be used with the support of an epidemiologist or air pollution impact assessment expert. To facilitate users in their analyses, AirQ+ comes with manuals that require increasing levels of expertise. AirQ+ includes a module with life tables, designed to predict changes in health impacts anticipated from changes in long-term exposure to air pollution. AirQ+ allows estimating the years of life lost with calculations for one specific year and for the entire follow up period, for all-cause mortality due to specific air pollution exposure for a given population within an area. It also calculates the change in life expectancy attributed to long-term exposure to ambient air pollutants