The (very) long run health effects of industrial pollution

The aim of this project is to create a database that can be used to study how industrial pollution affects health in the long run.

The project uses advanced machine learning methods to digitise the original returns from the official manufacturing statistics between 1900 and 1962.

The material contains data on all manufacturing establishments in Sweden above a certain size and includes information on the scale of production.

Together with information from other databases on emissions and pollution as well as where people lived, and a range of measures related to health and well-being, we can measure the impact of industrial pollution on these outcomes.

As the database can be linked to already digitized data for the 19th century as well as register data on manufacturing establishments for the period after 1962, it will be the world´s longest running micro database of information on manufacturing establishments.

This long time span will allow us to study the long run effects of industrial pollution on health in a way that has not been possible before.

Firstly, we will be able to follow individuals over their entire lifetime and measure how industrial pollution has affected their health. Second, we will be able to measure whether exposure to emissions has consequences across generations.

Third, we will be able to map potential soil pollution from industrial emissions that can accumulate over time as many substances do not degrade.

This will allow us to identify no longer existing industrial manufacturing sites and examine whether past pollution affects health outcomes today.

An important component that will be investigated in all these studies is whether industrial pollution is something that has affected different strata of society to different extents and whether this is something that has changed over time. We will then investigate, for example, how class and gender have had an impact on outcomes.

The long run perspective also allows us to examine how societal and institutional changes have influenced the impact of emissions on people from different backgrounds. For example, we can study the impact of changes in urban planning regimes.

The project is thus groundbreaking both in relation to the database that will be created and the type of research it will enable.