Eighteen years of recommendations to prevent industrial chemical incidents: results and lessons learned of the US Chemical Safety Board.

OBJECTIVES: The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB), a federal agency that investigates significant chemical incidents and hazards, is interested in determining the impact of the recommendations resulting from its investigations, and how to better more effective recommendations to prevent chemical incidents. STUDY DESIGN: This is a descriptive study of the US Chemical Safety Board's safety recommendations. METHODS: The CSB coded and analysed its safety recommendations according to potential impact on reducing incidents, implementation status, purpose and recipient type. RESULTS: As of March 31, 2015, the CSB has issued 733 recommendations, 75% (548) of which are closed and 25% (185) of which remain open. For recommendations categorised as having high, medium, and low impact, 38% (78), 76% (160), and 78% (245) were implemented, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: CSB recommendations have led to important and lasting safety changes through regulations, industry guidance and voluntary consensus standards, and individual companies; however, coding recommendations by potential impact do not fully capture the influence of CSB recommendations. While this methodology serves as a preliminary way to determine the effect of recommendations, further data are needed to determine the extent to which these safety changes have reduced the frequency or severity of industrial accidents.

Mortality Attributable to Ambient Air Pollution: A Review of Global Estimates.

Since the publication of the first epidemiological study to establish the connection between long-term exposure to atmospheric pollution and effects on human health, major efforts have been dedicated to estimate the attributable mortality burden, especially in the context of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). In this work, we review the estimates of excess mortality attributable to outdoor air pollution at the global scale, by comparing studies available in the literature. We find large differences between the estimates, which are related to the exposure response functions as well as the number of health outcomes included in the calculations, aspects where further improvements are necessary. Furthermore, we show that despite the considerable advancements in our understanding of health impacts of air pollution and the consequent improvement in the accuracy of the global estimates, their precision has not increased in the last decades. We offer recommendations for future measurements and research directions, which will help to improve our understanding and quantification of air pollution-health relationships.

CO2 emissions from C40 cities: citywide emission inventories and comparisons with global gridded emission datasets.

Under the leadership of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), approximately 1100 global cities have signed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Accurate greenhouse gas emission calculations at the city-scale have become critical. This study forms a bridge between the two emission calculation methods: (a) the city-scale accounting used by C40 cities-the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC) and (b) the global-scale gridded datasets used by the research community-the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) and Open-Source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC). For the emission magnitudes of 78 C40 cities, we find good correlations between the GPC and EDGAR (R 2 = 0.80) and the GPC and ODIAC (R 2 = 0.72). Regionally, African cities show the largest variability in the three emission estimates. For the emission trends, the standard deviation of the differences is ±4.7% yr-1 for EDGAR vs. GPC and is ±3.9% yr-1 for ODIAC vs. GPC: a factor of ∼2 larger than the trends that many C40 cities pledged (net-zero by 2050 from 2010, or -2.5% yr-1). To examine the source of discrepancies in the emission datasets, we assess the impact of spatial resolutions of EDGAR (0.1°) and ODIAC (1 km) on estimating varying-sized cities' emissions. Our analysis shows that the coarser resolution of EDGAR can artificially decrease emissions by 13% for cities smaller than 1000 km2. We find that data quality of emission factors (EFs) used in GPC inventories vary regionally: the highest quality for European and North American and the lowest for African and Latin American cities. Our study indicates that the following items should be prioritized to reduce the discrepancies between the two emission calculation methods: (a) implementing local-specific/up-to-date EFs in GPC inventories, (b) keeping the global power plant database current, and (c) incorporating satellite-derived CO2 datasets (i.e. NASA OCO-3).

Future Fire Impacts on Smoke Concentrations, Visibility, and Health in the Contiguous United States.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from U.S. anthropogenic sources is decreasing. However, previous studies have predicted that PM2.5 emissions from wildfires will increase in the midcentury to next century, potentially offsetting improvements gained by continued reductions in anthropogenic emissions. Therefore, some regions could experience worse air quality, degraded visibility, and increases in population-level exposure. We use global climate model simulations to estimate the impacts of changing fire emissions on air quality, visibility, and premature deaths in the middle and late 21st century. We find that PM2.5 concentrations will decrease overall in the contiguous United States (CONUS) due to decreasing anthropogenic emissions (total PM2.5 decreases by 3% in Representative Concentration Pathway [RCP] 8.5 and 34% in RCP4.5 by 2100), but increasing fire-related PM2.5 (fire-related PM2.5 increases by 55% in RCP4.5 and 190% in RCP8.5 by 2100) offsets these benefits and causes increases in total PM2.5 in some regions. We predict that the average visibility will improve across the CONUS, but fire-related PM2.5 will reduce visibility on the worst days in western and southeastern U.S. regions. We estimate that the number of deaths attributable to total PM2.5 will decrease in both the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios (from 6% to 4-5%), but the absolute number of premature deaths attributable to fire-related PM2.5 will double compared to early 21st century. We provide the first estimates of future smoke health and visibility impacts using a prognostic land-fire model. Our results suggest the importance of using realistic fire emissions in future air quality projections.