Health impact assessment of air pollution: introductory manual to AirQ+ (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. This manual shows how to install, run and perform simple analyses with AirQ+ to introduce users to some of the software’s features. For example, users can calculate the attributable proportion of adverse health impacts estimated to occur due to exposure to a specific level of air pollution in a given population for a certain time period. This is used to estimate the number of attributable cases due to air pollution.