Estimating Health Impacts Due to the Reduction of Particulate Air Pollution from the Household Sector Expected under Various Scenarios

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript “Estimating health impacts due to the reduction of particulate air pollution from the household sector expected under various scenarios” by Adamkiewicz et al. is a very simple and straight forward study regarding the implementation of different scenarios (with the implementation of different mitigation measures) to improve air quality (focusing on particulate matter) and the evaluation of the health outputs in two areas of Poland.

The manuscript needs to be reviewed regarding the English in order to clarify the language. At this moment, the manuscript seems to be lacking a more deep analysis of results (along with the limitations of the study) and comparison with other studies. The introduction needs as well to be improved.

Specific comments:

• Line 42 – Global Burden of Disease Study is not an international organization, as stated, but an outcome of Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Correct it.
• Lines 55-56 – provide a short overview of the mitigations measures proposed by the “Anti-smog regulations”.
• Line 61 – “impact” is more appropriate than “results”
• Line 78 – Rewrite the sentence… E.g., use “For instance, traffic congestion(…)”
• Line 81-83 - Rewrite the sentence (it is not easy to understand what the authors want to explain).
• Line 84 – I tried to check this result from reference [20] and did not manage to find it. Please check it. Also refer to which pollutants are related those decreases that would reduce the number of premature deaths per 100k a.
• The introduction should end with a paragraph summarizing the main goals of the study.
• Which type of information provides Table 2? The age of buildings? It seems that is regarding the % of building ages that exist… Please rephrase the caption in order to clarify its content.
• Why “kWh/m2*”? What * means?
• Table 4 – emission reduction regarding to which pollutant? Include it on the caption.
• Line 197 – Use “1.080”
• Line 267/268 – Reference for “As an extreme example, particulate matter with a 267 content of more than 80% NaCl (salt) has positive health properties.”?
• Line 277 – It is not “34.7%” considering Table 6 (it is 34.3%) – correct it.
• Lines 281/282 – These results (“Taking into account the population size of the regions, scenario 1 will result in a lower number of premature deaths of 38.7 per 100k a. in Lower Silesia and 57.5 per 100k a. in Lodzkie.”) are not presented in the results.
• Please use 3 significant digits when presenting values throughout all the manuscript.
• Figures 1 (from a to d) should have other colors (for example, red or orange) in order for the reader check immediately if concentrations are higher or not. (e.g., light red—low values; dark red – high values)

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for both positive remarks and those more critical ones which inspired us for further discussion and to revise the article. We have made amendments regarding the clarifying language terminology, and improving analysis. Revised version of our manuscript is in attachment.

Please find below our responses to specific comments (marked bold).

Best regards,

Łukasz Adamkiewicz  and co-authors.

The manuscript needs to be reviewed regarding the English in order to clarify the language. At this moment, the manuscript seems to be lacking a more deep analysis of results (along with the limitations of the study) and comparison with other studies. The introduction needs as well to be improved.

• Introduction was improved taking into account language and reviewer specific comments. More limitations of the study were included into discussion.

Specific comments:

• Line 42 – Global Burden of Disease Study is not an international organization, as stated, but an outcome of Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Correct it. –
  • The name of institution has been corrected in the manuscript

• Lines 55-56 – provide a short overview of the mitigations measures proposed by the “Anti-smog regulations”. –

• • Short, the most important information in terms of anti-smog laws has been provided in Introduction

• Line 61 – “impact” is more appropriate than “results” - .

• • corrected in manuscript

• Line 78 – Rewrite the sentence… E.g., use “For instance, traffic congestion(…)” –

• • corrected in manuscript

• Line 81-83 - Rewrite the sentence (it is not easy to understand what the authors want to explain). –

• • corrected in manuscript

• Line 84 – I tried to check this result from reference [20] and did not manage to find it. Please check it. Also refer to which pollutants are related those decreases that would reduce the number of premature deaths per 100k a. –

• • The mentioned publication shows a result of 2 avoided premature death in 3.8 mln population in the study area calculations. Therefore for the purpose of our article we converted it to 0.05 premature deaths per 100k a

• The introduction should end with a paragraph summarizing the main goals of the study. –

• • The main goals of our study have been added at the end of Introduction.

• Which type of information provides Table 2? The age of buildings? It seems that is regarding the % of building ages that exist… Please rephrase the caption in order to clarify its content.

• • The caption was corrected.

• Why “kWh/m2*”? What * means? –

• • The symbol “*” means multiply by, it was removed because it cause misunderstanding

• Table 4 – emission reduction regarding to which pollutant? Include it on the caption  –

• • Additional information was added in manuscript

• Line 197 – Use “1.080” –

• • corrected in manuscript

• Line 267/268 – Reference for “As an extreme example, particulate matter with a 267 content of more than 80% NaCl (salt) has positive health properties.”? –

• • Additional explanation was placed in manuscript

• Line 277 – It is not “34.7%” considering Table 6 (it is 34.3%) – correct it. –

• • corrected in manuscript

• Lines 281/282 – These results (“Taking into account the population size of the regions, scenario 1 will result in a lower number of premature deaths of 38.7 per 100k a. in Lower Silesia and 57.5 per 100k a. in Lodzkie.”) are not presented in the results. –

• • The table 6 has been modified to provide these information

• Please use 3 significant digits when presenting values throughout all the manuscript. –

• • whole manuscript amended

• Figures 1 (from a to d) should have other colors (for example, red or orange) in order for the reader check immediately if concentrations are higher or not. (e.g., light red—low values; dark red – high values)
  • We decided to choose such a graphical solution to have the separates colours ranges due to 2 different size of PMs and also to be able for a reader to see differences between regions

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The current manuscript provides the health impact of 3 scenarios which aim to reduce air pollution in 2 cities in Poland. The content and the outcome of the manuscript is significant for both the scientific community and the citizens. Although the applied scenarios is characterized by local level elements, the overall methodological approach could be replicate and used also in other cities. However authors used a simplified approach to estimate the health impact of the proposed scenarios while the input data suffer from quantity and comprenhesiveness. Nevertheless the overall impact of the manuscript in the scientific community could be significant and for that purpose I recommend the publication of the manuscript after minor revision.

• Introduction: Add at the end (after line 88) the purpose of the current manuscript and the added value comparing with the previous mentioned studies
• Emission, health and population data for scenarios: Authors should provide more details of the source of the data applied to the models (e.g the dates they are referring to, reliability etc.) 
• The outcome of the study could be different if authors had taken into account the chemical composition of the measured PMs. They are referring to a source apportionment study (line 257), however extensive chemical analysis is needed in order to provide such results (at least heavy metals, organic/elemental carbon and ions). Authors provide an extreme example to highlight the importance of the chemical composition (line 267). However a more realistic example could also indicate the importance of PMs chemical composition in health impact assessment e.g the presence of PAHs in PMs which have low concentration values could have more adverse health impacts than PMs with higher concentrations but low PAHs content. For that purpose, would be feasible to enrich your database with more elements and introduce in your calculations chemical contents of PM?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for both positive remarks and those more critical ones which inspired us for further discussion and to revise the article. We have made amendments regarding the clarifying language terminology, and improving analysis. Revised version of our manuscript is in attachment.

Please find below our responses to specific comments (marked bold).

Best regards,

Łukasz Adamkiewicz  and co-authors.

The current manuscript provides the health impact of 3 scenarios which aim to reduce air pollution in 2 cities in Poland. The content and the outcome of the manuscript is significant for both the scientific community and the citizens. Although the applied scenarios is characterized by local level elements, the overall methodological approach could be replicate and used also in other cities. However authors used a simplified approach to estimate the health impact of the proposed scenarios while the input data suffer from quantity and comprenhesiveness. Nevertheless the overall impact of the manuscript in the scientific community could be significant and for that purpose I recommend the publication of the manuscript after minor revision.

• Introduction: Add at the end (after line 88) the purpose of the current manuscript and the added value comparing with the previous mentioned studies –

• • The main goals have been added

• Emission, health and population data for scenarios: Authors should provide more details of the source of the data applied to the models (e.g the dates they are referring to, reliability etc.) –

• • We has provided information about data in the text:
    • ‘The scenarios with EMEP4PL were run four times for the entire year 2015’
    • ‘the population was taken from the 2011 national census with a 1 km x 1 km grid’
    • We added one additional sentence, that explain the health and population data ‘We used 2015 dataset to be able to relate health information with air quality dataset’.
• The outcome of the study could be different if authors had taken into account the chemical composition of the measured PMs. They are referring to a source apportionment study (line 257), however extensive chemical analysis is needed in order to provide such results (at least heavy metals, organic/elemental carbon and ions). Authors provide an extreme example to highlight the importance of the chemical composition (line 267). However a more realistic example could also indicate the importance of PMs chemical composition in health impact assessment e.g the presence of PAHs in PMs which have low concentration values could have more adverse health impacts than PMs with higher concentrations but low PAHs content. For that purpose, would be feasible to enrich your database with more elements and introduce in your calculations chemical contents of PM? –
  • We added explanation in the discussion why we couldn’t add chemical content of PM to our analysis

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I have taken a general look at the submitted manuscript, which have found of interest, however deep issues should be addressed prior to publication I think. At the moment it is very difficult for me to enter all details of the manuscript, as I am out of office for several days, but I would like to take a look anyway to the manuscript, as I follow very much the topic of the presented work. The structure, but also the rigourous scientific approach need a deeper explanation, as well as the application to the Poland case studies, and also the references which need a serious updating. I feel free to suggest to take a look at the following multidisciplinary special issue on dust that has recently been coordinated and published (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-016-2504-9); it is interesting I think, as it is an interdisciplinary reference on the topic of dust and related applications. Best regards

Dr. Domenico Doronzo

03 December, 2020

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank you for both positive remarks and those more critical ones which inspired us for further discussion and to revise the article. We have made amendments regarding the clarifying language terminology, and improving analysis. Revised version of our manuscript is in attachment.

Please find below our responses to specific comments (marked bold).

Best regards,

Łukasz Adamkiewicz  and co-authors.

I have taken a general look at the submitted manuscript, which have found of interest, however deep issues should be addressed prior to publication I think. At the moment it is very difficult for me to enter all details of the manuscript, as I am out of office for several days, but I would like to take a look anyway to the manuscript, as I follow very much the topic of the presented work. The structure, but also the rigourous scientific approach need a deeper explanation, as well as the application to the Poland case studies, and also the references which need a serious updating. I feel free to suggest to take a look at the following multidisciplinary special issue on dust that has recently been coordinated and published (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-016-2504-9); it is interesting I think, as it is an interdisciplinary reference on the topic of dust and related applications. –

• According to your suggestions, we amended introduction, expanded discussion, and added explanation in the discussion why we couldn’t add chemical content of PM to our analysis.
• We didn’t find any Polish health impact assessment of air pollution reduction scenario to include in our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for providing a review that answered to my previous issues regarding your submission.