Health and Air Pollution in NZ

A number of agencies, government departments and councils have become very interested in understanding more about the health effects of air pollution in New Zealand. Although it is not a problem on the same scale as in many other parts of the world, it is still an issue of concern, with particular focus on particulate matter. Earlier studies involving staff from the Geography Department (University of Canterbury) have suggested that nearly 1000 New Zealanders a year die from air pollution.

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The project involves a consortium of researchers as part of a large study to determine what the health effects are, their causes, the costs associated with these effects, and the potential range of policy options to reduce them. The funding for the project is a joint initiative between the Health Research Council, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry for the Environment. The $1M project runs over three years and will feed a number of results back into various related projects and policy developments.

The project has been structured into discrete components, with strong links across the various activities. The first step is to assess the extent of air pollution, who is responsible for it, the processes that determine personal exposure, and time frame over which people are exposed. The next step is to calculate the medical and biological effects on people. This part of the project is being supplemented with a new study, which is gauging specific effects on a group of school children in Christchurch. Once the effects are known, the costs and economic implications need to be assessed, and a range of actions and policy options suggested for improving the situation.

Initially we will conduct a prototype study on Christchurch, to get a better understanding of effects of poor air quality there and to trial the economic and policy assessment methodologies. Results will be published as they become available, with the full prototype study finished by mid 2004.

The overall aim of this project is to determine the health effects of air pollution in urban areas of New Zealand, by source, by pollutant, and by region, including the causes of these effects. Assess the costs to the community and the economy, and examine policy options for managing and reducing the costs and effects.

A major part of the HAPINZ project is to produce accurate measures of pollution exposure for the population of New Zealand. In the first year, the HAPINZ project will be focusing on Christchurch. Christchurch is relatively data-rich in terms of air pollution data and the aim is to develop an accurate estimate of exposure. As data are more limited in other parts of New Zealand it is hoped that it will be possible to identify a reasonably accurate surrogate for exposure, based on more readily available data for the rest of New Zealand, such as census data. This is very much work in progress and so is constantly evolving and changing. The data manipulation and analysis includes assessment and modelling of the role of emissions sources and atmospheric processes in determining spatial and temporal variations in air pollution across the city. This work is being carried out using numerical models of local and regional atmospheric processes alongside Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques. Simply put, a GIS is a series of computer maps that enable the overlaying of maps onto each other and comparison of their characteristics. Each map or coverage, as they are more usually referred to, can also have attribute data attached. One of the key ways GIS will be used is to relate the estimates or surrogates of pollution to real monitored values. One technique that will be used is spatial regression, which calculates which combination of surrogates can best predict the real monitored values of pollution. The data sources being used in the HAPINZ study are varied but include census, estimated domestic and industrial emissions, vehicle fleet emissions, and air pollution and meteorological monitoring.

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