Decision-making and planning in rapidly growing urban centres require integrated assessment tools to determine impacts on environmental exposure, health and well being and inequalities. However, there is a lack of practical tools of sufficient spatial detail with which to determine current and future integrated exposure and health risks and to evaluate public policy options. In particular, despite the increasing availability of data, environmental datasets are limited to a few urban monitoring sites and information rich health microdata usually have restricted access (for confidentiality reasons). Moreover, spatio-temporal risk models are required to link exposure and health data to health outcomes and hence determine changes in risk from different policy and planning options. The overall aim of this project is create an interactive data platform, for Glasgow as an example urban environment that integrates geographically specific environmental exposure and health data and modelling: "QCumber-envHealth" to be used to quantify environmental exposure and health risks under different policy scenarios. This project brings together researchers from Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC), and from the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde. CERC has extensive experience in software development, modelling and analysing city data, including environmental exposure modelling and the innovative "QCumber" data platform. The Universities have extensive research expertise in environmental exposure, human health and inequalities, including comprehensive high density measurement capabilities, the development of novel synthetic data estimation techniques for information rich health microdata and spatio-temporal health risk modelling. Close engagement with identified end-users at Glasgow City Council, Transport Scotland, Future cities Glasgow, Health Protection Scotland and NHS Glasgow, will commence at the onset of the project and be maintained throughout. The new "QCumber-envHealth" data platform will be customized by CERC to create a spatio-temporal database and interactive mapping tool for Glasgow integrating a wide range of existing and accessible datasets including health behaviour data available from the research team and linking with environmental modelling of air quality and noise (key innovation). Comprehensive measurements of air quality will be carried out to evaluate and improve existing Q-cumber exposure modelling capabilities with a focus on determining exposure along transport routes (key innovation). Key health micro datasets will be identified in collaboration with end users and synthesised (key innovation) for integration into the QCumber-envHealth platform. Health risk models will be developed for small area and micro data and integrated into QCumber-envHealth (key innovation). Working with end users, several relevant public policy scenarios associated with changing environmental (e.g. air or noise pollution, green space) or social (e.g. smoking prevalence, transport route) factors will be selected and health outcomes within the complex urban environment quantified (new innovation). The platform tool will be developed for use in Glasgow, but its methods and models will be fully transferable to other cities in the UK and worldwide. A commercialisation plan and timeline to market QCumber-envhealth to identified wider users across the UK: small authorities and larger local authorities, public bodies and commercial companies will be rolled out commencing with a dissemination workshop in the later stage of the project and presentations at national conferences e.g. Environmental Protection UK. In summary, this project will combine leading research, innovative technological developments and insights from end users to deliver the new QCumber-envHealth platform for integrated exposure and health assessment to enable decision-making and planning in urban centres, fulfilling a longstanding market need.

Air pollution is the most significant environmental risk in the UK, leading to economic costs of £20b/y and significant health inequalities. Quantifying the changing causes of air pollution motivated NERC investment in three fixed air quality supersites - located in urban background locations within London, Birmingham and Manchester, operated via the UKRI SPF project OSCA. In parallel, the forthcoming (early 2021) revision of WHO guidelines will inform new national air quality targets, within the new Environment Bill, which are likely to reflect population-averaged exposure. Poor air quality arises from the interaction of emissions, meteorology and atmospheric processes, affecting the loading and toxicity of the species present. Two key uncertainties are 1 The balance between traffic and urban emissions, and pollutants already present in the air arriving from upwind, key to the regional and national policy responsibility for improving air quality. 2 The interaction between spatially varying emissions and chemical processing affecting air quality, including the role of agricultural emissions and transport shifts for Net Zero. Here, we will develop new UK community capability to address these uncertainties: Flexibly configurable air quality supersite triplets, spanning upwind, roadside and urban observational capability. UK-AQST comprises the existing fixed supersites (urban), augmented by two mobile "supersites" to study (for example) upwind rural and roadside air composition. The two units will be located within sustainable mobile platforms (one electric van, one trailer for maximum flexibility) operated to national standards and producing open-access data. The supersites are not traditional monitoring stations - they will comprise highly sophisticated instruments which monitor key species in atmospheric processes such as ammonia (key to aerosol formation), VOCs (key to ozone, secondary organic aerosol and new particle formation), as well as trace metals, nanoparticles and particle composition in near-real time, in addition to regulated gas pollutants. By using a triplet site configuration (rural, urban, roadside), not only can urban and roadside concentration increments be measured, the processing of polluted air to form key secondary pollutants such as nitrate and secondary organic particles, and freshly formed nanoparticles can be viewed in unprecedented detail to yield process understanding. The triplet observations will generate a step-change in scientific capability for quantifying air pollution sources and processes at a fundamental level, thus consolidating UK's world-leading position in this field. It will produce policy relevant science with significant impact, particularly in informing air quality policy including the validation of approaches accounting for imported emissions, with applications across the UK and for analogous challenges globally.

This Innovation project for impact will bring together policy and practice leaders concerned with how planning decisions affect urban air quality. The overarching aim is to make a software platform for the quantitative assessment of Green Infrastructure as an aid to the improvement of roadside air quality. We call this platform GI4RAQ. Our particular objectives can be summarised as: 1. to provide a consolidated, open-source, computer modelling code for roadside air pollution in urban settings based on our existing research code. 2. to co-design of a fit-for-purpose, simple, and attractive GI4RAQ platform for urban practitioners as a front-end to the consolidated model code. 3. to demonstrate that the GI4RAQ platform can unlock a critical impasse in current planning policy and so enable capacity-building on the regulatory and consultancy sides of the planning process. We will work with major influencers in the private and public sectors, which offers a rapid and cost-effective route to meaningful impact. Specifically, we will work with Transport for London and the Greater London Authority to influence the next issue of the London Plan. To be released towards the end of 2019, a proposed new policy requiring larger-scale developments to be 'Air Quality Positive' may be implemented, but only if tools exist to evidence such a result at planning. We will work with the UK's leading air quality consultants, Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC) and Ricardo Energy & Environment, to ensure that the GI4RAQ platform is fit for operational use and that it can be used alongside current Air Quality tools. London's 33 Local Authorities must ensure their Local Plans conform to the London Plan, and Authorities across the UK look to the London Plan in preparing their own Local Plans, both of which provide cascading impact for our proposed work. The project is designed to dovetail with 'WM Air', a large multi-partner programme focused on West Midlands' air quality led by the University of Birmingham. The GI4RAQ Principal Investigator leads the work stream on green infrastructure in WM Air alongside GI4RAQ partner Birmingham City Council, thereby ensuring rapid knowledge transfer between research and practice in London and Birmingham. The project will establish a robust approach to 'GI4RAQ' interventions to deliver reliable improvements in roadside air quality, based on quantitative computer modelling but avoiding the time and expense of full fluid flow simulations. The approach develops directly out of a NERC Innovation Pathfinder, which established that a strong demand for quantitative GI4RAQ exists, but also identified the policy impasse, and a placement of the researcher co-Investigator in Transport for London.

Air pollution is well established as having major negative impacts on human well-being, vegetation and general quality of life. Whilst the exact biological pathways and mechanisms for health impacts remain to be established, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that months to many years of life expectancy can be lost through exposure to air pollution outside. Those negative impacts are currently disproportionately experienced by those in living the world's largest cities and in rapidly developing economies. The basic causes of air pollution are understood; the combustion of fossil fuels for electricity, transport, cooking and heating, emissions from agriculture, from resource extraction, dust and so on, all play a part. Over the past two centuries economic expansion has always been closely tied to transition periods of increased air pollution and negative social and health outcomes. A key global challenge for the 21st century is to create a framework - scientific, regulatory, and technological - which enables economic development, with increases in individual prosperity and quality of life, without damaging air pollution as a side effect. Many of the processes associated with air pollution are non-linear in nature however, and the extremely complex composition of air, as both gases and particles, can make it very difficult to establish direct cause-and-effect. Pollutants often interact with one another in unexpected ways that can create negative unintended consequences from superficially reasonable policy interventions. This is a key area where scientific understanding remains incomplete. The inability to fully describe the chemistry and physics of the urban atmosphere limits society's ability to create effective solutions that work, and that do not conflict with wider developmental and economic goals. This project tackles some of the key uncertainties that remain in urban air processes, including how polluting chemicals are transformed or oxidised in the atmosphere, how gases and particles interact, how pollution is dispersed by weather, how remote emissions from outside the city impacts on urban populations and how the presence of pollution itself may affect feedback and alter on meteorology in cities. The project focuses its study on three key types of harmful air pollution: particulate matter (referred to as PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone O3. The project is a collaboration between ten UK Universities, three leading Chinese research institutes, all part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and three UK partner research organisations (CERC, NPL, Met Office). The project centre-piece are two periods of intensive observations in the centre of Beijing, in the contrasting atmospheric conditions of winter and summer. The experiments will make measurements at the surface, and in the vertical using a unique 1000ft meteorological tower. These experiments will generate a complex and multiparameter dataset that can challenge state of the art computer models of urban pollution. By challenging models with detailed data, their capabilities can be assessed and their weaknesses and failings identified, and then targeted for improvement. This is vital since the pathway to achieving better air quality is through policy that is underpinned by scientific understanding, and in air pollution science, that understanding is encapsulated in these computer models. The project will use state of the art models from the UK and from China, and develop methods to generate very high spatial resolution estimates of pollution at the surface, a type of data that is essential when studying the health effects of pollution, or evaluating how successful a future policy might be.

The challenge articulated in this proposal is: how to develop cities with no air pollution and no heat-island effect by 2050? It is difficult to predict with precision the future of cities, but there will be significant adaptations and changes by 2050, due to advances in technology, changing populations, social expectations and climate change. A roadmap is needed to ensure that decisions taken as the city evolves lead towards a sustainable future. Approximately half of the energy use, carbon dioxide emissions and exposure to air pollution in cities is due to either buildings or transportation, and this total energy use is increasing. Air pollution is projected to be the leading global cause of mortality by 2050. Therefore the question posed here in terms of air quality and temperature rise is important in its own right. However, these quantities together also provide, perhaps uniquely, specific measurable physical properties that cover an entire city and provide a metric for assessing the sustainability of system-wide decisions. Traditional approaches to urban environmental control rely on energy-consuming and carbon/toxics-producing heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. These traditional approaches produce an unsustainable cycle of increasing energy use with associated emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants leading to rising temperatures implying, in turn, greater use of HVAC. Breaking this vicious cycle requires a completely different engineered solution, one that couples with natural systems and does not depend solely on mechanical systems. This project will develop a facility consisting of an integrated suite of models and an associated management and decision support system that together allow the city design and its operation to manage the air so that it becomes its own HVAC system, with clean, cool air providing low-energy solutions for health and comfort. This will be achieved by using natural ventilation in buildings to reduce demand for energy and ensuring air pollutants are diluted below levels that cause adverse health effects, coupled with increased albedo to reduce the heat island effect plus green (parks) and blue (water) spaces to provide both cooling and filtration of pollutants. We have brought together a trans-disciplinary research team to construct this facility. It will be comprised of three components: (i) a fully resolved air quality model that interacts with sensor data and provides detailed calculations of the air flow, pollutant and temperature distributions in complex city geometries and is fully coupled to naturally ventilated buildings, and green and blue spaces; (ii) reduced order models that allow rapid calculations for real time analysis and emergency response; and (iii) a cost-benefit model to assess the economic, social and environmental viability of options and decision. The scientific air quality component is a fully-resolved computational model that couples external and internal flows in naturally ventilated buildings at the building, block and borough scales. It will be supported and validated by field measurements at selected sites and by wind tunnel and salt-bath laboratory studies. The reduced order models will be developed from the computational model and from laboratory process studies, and will be capable of producing gross features such as mean pollutant concentrations and temperatures. They will be used to provide capabilities for scoping studies, and real-time and emergency response. The cost-benefit model will provide the link between the scientific and engineering models and implementation advice. It will include modules for the built environment, public spaces and transportation, and provide estimates of the life-cycle costs and benefits of the various scenarios at the individual building, city block and borough scales. Eventually, it is envisaged that this will also include social and health effects.