Air Quality

NLR's air quality research investigates the energy system's impact on air quality and public health.

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Improving Public Health by Addressing Air Quality Problems

Outdoor air pollution contributes to over four million deaths per year, making it the fourth leading cause of death globally. As governments and public leaders work to mitigate these effects, they rely on an accurate understanding of air quality and its impact on health to evaluate the effectiveness of potential actions and interventions.

NLR researchers have developed the capabilities needed to provide these insights both domestically and internationally. NLR's air quality research capabilities include:

• Codevelopment and implementation of a novel, reduced-complexity air quality model, Global Intervention Model for Air Pollution (Global InMAP), to model global air quality and health changes
• Application of a range of source-specific and regional air quality models to analyze changes to pollutant concentrations
• Air quality and public health impact analysis for both domestic and international regions, including on jobs and economy
• Quantification of air quality and public health cobenefits for any energy sector.

These capabilities allow NLR to conduct air quality research in different contexts, including both domestic and international, all energy sectors including power, transportation and industry, and fuels such as hydrogen and biofuels. In each of these analyses, NLR researchers follow a fundamental multistep approach by:

• Identifying emission sources and their changes
• Translating the changes in sources to changes in emissions
• Modeling air pollutant concentrations
• Conducting health impact estimations
• Analyzing the distribution of pollutants and health impacts to regions and populations.

These steps are applied both domestically and internationally to develop a comprehensive understanding of a given region's air quality status and help map a path toward improvements.

Publications

Biochemical Conversion of Herbaceous Biomass to Renewable Diesel: Biorefinery Marginal Air Quality Impacts and Comparison to Feedstock Production, NLR Technical Report (2026)

Impact of Wildfires on Solar Generation, Reserves, and Energy Prices, NLR Technical Report (2023)

Emission Factors of Industrial Boilers Burning Biomass-Derived Fuels, Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association (2023)

Improvement of Aerosol Optical Depth Data for Localized Solar Resource Assessment, Solar Energy (2023)

Quantifying Impacts of Renewable Electricity Deployment on Air Quality and Human Health in South Asia Based on AIMS III Scenarios, NLR Fact Sheet (2022)

Partner With NLR

NLR works with stakeholders at the international, domestic, and regional levels to analyze the impacts of energy system changes on air quality and public health.

Learn how to partner with NLR.

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