Integrated human exposure to air pollution

Dear Colleagues,

Air pollution is one of the major environmental health problems that people face nowadays, affecting everyone in the world. The World Health Organization has estimated that, in 2016, ambient air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide, in both cities and rural areas, while household air pollution caused 3.8 million deaths, mainly in low and middle-income countries.

Usually, citizen exposure to air pollutants is calculated based only on concentrations of pollutants monitored using air quality monitoring stations from environment national agencies. These monitoring stations focus on outdoor air quality and, most of them, are located in urban centres. However, this approach fails to account for all components of exposure since:

• There is a high variability of air pollutant concentrations within a city, depending on the city topography and the existence (or not) of specific pollution sources (such high traffic areas);
• The time–activity patterns and the use of spaces is very heterogeneous within the population;
• People spend around 90% of their time in indoor environments.

Therefore, human exposure during a full day cannot be reflected only by outdoor exposure and should consider all micro-environments where individuals spend their time (e.g., home, workplace, transports, leisure, and others) and the time spent in them.

The characterization of indoor and outdoor environments is essential to understand the integrated human exposure to air pollutants. With this Special Issue, we invite colleagues to contribute to increase the knowledge about human exposure in different micro-environments, specific exposures that individuals are under when performing specific tasks, methodologies to understand pollution sources and their impact on indoor and ambient air quality, with the main aim of developing the most effective mitigation measures to decrease human exposure and protect public health.

Dr. Nuno Canha
Dr. Susana Marta Almeida
Dr. Evangelia Diapouli
Guest Editors

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