RESEARCH ARTICLE Development of an integrated policy making tool for assessing air quality and human health benefits of air pollution control Xuezhen QIU 1 , Yun ZHU (✉) 1 , Carey JANG 2 , Che-Jen LIN 1,3 , Shuxiao WANG 4 , Joshua FU 5 , Junping XIE 1 , Jiandong WANG 4 , Dian DING 1 , Shicheng LONG 1 1 Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Pollution Control, College of Environment and Energy, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou 510006, China 2 USEPA/Office of Air Quality Planning & Standards, RTP, NC 27711, USA 3 Department of Civil Engineering, Lamar University, Beaumont, TX 77710-0024, USA 4 State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China 5 Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-2010, USA © Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Abstract Efficient air quality management is critical to protect public health from the adverse impacts of air pollution. To evaluate the effectiveness of air pollution control strategies, the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) has developed the Software for Model Attainment Test-Community Edition (SMAT-CE) to assess the air quality attainment of emission reductions, and the Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program- Community Edition (BenMAP-CE) to evaluate the health and economic benefits of air quality improvement respectively. Since scientific decision-making requires timely and coherent information, developing the linkage between SMAT-CE and BenMAP-CE into an integrated assessment platform is desirable. To address this need, a new module linking SMAT-CE to BenMAP-CE has been developed and tested. The new module streamlines the assessment of air quality and human health benefits for a proposed air pollution control strategy. It also implements an optimized data gridding algorithm which significantly enhances the computational efficiency without compro- mising accuracy. The performance of the integrated software package is demonstrated through a case study that evaluates the air quality and associated economic benefits of a national-level control strategy of PM 2.5 . The results of the case study show that the proposed emission reduction reduces the number of nonattainment sites from 379 to 25 based on the US National Ambient Air Quality Standards, leading to more than US$334 billion of economic benefits annually from improved public health. The integration of the science-based software tools in this study enhances the efficiency of developing effective and optimized emission control strategies for policy makers. Keywords air quality assessment, human health benefit, economic benefit, air quality attainment assessment, air pollution control strategy, decision support system 1 Introduction Air pollution has adverse health effects including pre- mature mortality [1–3], morbidity of cardiovascular diseases [4] and respiratory problems [5,6]. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that ambient air pollution causes 3.7 million deaths in 2012, which include 40% ischemic heart disease, 40% stroke, 11% chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 6% lung cancer, and 3% acute lower respiratory infections in children [7]. Therefore, improving air quality through emission control is critical to protect public health. Air quality management is a practice that evaluates emission reduction options to achieve a desired air quality standard in many countries [8]. To determine the emission reduction goals, careful considerations must be given to the effectiveness of emission control, the cost of the control technologies as well as the economic and social benefits of air quality improvement [9]. Based on the analysis of costs and benefits, policy makers can implement the most effective control strategy to protect the public health. Such Received March 4, 2015; accepted May 18, 2015 E-mail: zhuyun@scut.edu.cn Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 2015, 9(6): 1056–1065 DOI 10.1007/s11783-015-0796-8