Regulators underrate air pollution mortality by $100B, ignore racial gaps: study

The federal government’s approach to air pollution management largely ignores differences across race and ethnicity — underestimating associated mortality costs by $100 billion, a new study has found. 

Current regulatory analyses assume that all populations are affected equally by air pollution, but older Black and Hispanic individuals are much more likely to die prematurely due to air pollution exposure, according to the study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives. 

“Underlying mortality rates, pollution exposure and pollution vulnerability differ significantly across racial and ethnic groups,” Nicholas Z. Muller, study co-author and a professor of economics, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, said in a statement. 

Federal regulatory analyses of air pollution policies rely on generalized “concentration-response functions” — those that connect concentrations of pollutants to adverse health effects — and other health data to estimate mortality and morbidity impacts associated with policy changes related to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), according to the study. 

Rather than look at such collective impacts of air pollution on human health and mortality, the authors sought to determine how race and ethnicity play into these outcomes. 

While their approach did not change the total number of deaths, it did disperse the deaths differently across groups — linking an increased risk of premature mortality to specific racial and ethnicity characteristics.

After coupling racial and ethnic differences with underlying health vulnerabilities to pollution, the authors found a 9-percent increase in premature mortality estimates for all people older than 65 years — equivalent to a $100 billion increase in currently estimated mortality costs.

When they factored in racial impacts, however, they saw that the differential was even greater. The researchers found that premature mortality estimates related to fine particulate matter pollution jumped by 150 percent for older Black Americans and by 52 percent for older Hispanic Americans, according to the study. 

Under a scenario with uniform degradation of air quality across the country, older Black Americans had a mortality rate three times higher than white Americans, the researchers found. 

Acknowledging that their study was limited by the geographical aggregation of data available at the county level, the authors stressed that intra-county concentrations of fine particulate matter can vary greatly and that Black Americans are more likely to live near highways and other sources of high emissions. 

Elisheba Spiller, a study co-author and lead senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund, urged the government to make use of “the best available and most up-to-date race/ethnicity-specific information” related to the health effects of policy changes in future regulatory assessments.

Doing so, she said in a statement, can help “identify and reduce environmental injustices of air pollution.”