AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
A Computationally Efficient Model for Estimating the Social Costs of Air Pollutant Emissions
JINHYOK HEO, Peter Adams, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract Number: 412 Working Group: Health Related Aerosols
Abstract The social cost of emitting an air pollutant is defined as the monetized value of the various societal damages caused by that pollutant, including morbidity and mortality, visibility degradation, crop damage, etc. Estimates of the air pollutant social costs are used in a variety of policy analyses such as U.S. EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analyses. It involves the quantification of the changes in air quality, the estimation of social impacts from the changes, and the economic valuation of the impacts. Typically, premature mortality due to exposure to PM2.5 is the major contributor to social costs. Existing social cost estimates rely on a reduced-form air quality model, which often does not reflect major achievements made in air quality science in the past decades, resulting in unsatisfactory estimations. That is because even though such achievements are implemented in state-of-science 3-D chemical transport models (CTMs) they have often been too computationally expensive for social costs analysis. Based on the latest version of a 3-D CTM, the Particulate Matter Comprehensive Air Quality Model with extensions (PMCAMx), we developed a computationally efficient model for estimating the social costs of marginal emissions that embraces recent major achievements in air quality science.