Climate change and environmental health in Sweden – development and exploitation of a national exposome database (EXPO)

Air pollution is a major cause of disease burden globally. High temperatures and heat waves are of growing health concern because of global warming. Other environmental exposures of public health significance include transportation noise and lack of green space.

Research on environmental causes of disease relies on epidemiological studies, where high quality exposure estimates are needed on an individual level.

Recent developments in modeling of environmental exposures, e. g. including satellite data, have made it possible to assess both short- and long-term exposures with high precision, enabling accurate estimation of exposure-response relationships. Information on population exposures together with exposure-response data are required for health impact assessments.

We have recently launched the EXPO database, providing environmental exposure data for external users free of charge.

It contains data on levels of air pollutants, transportation noise, green/blue spaces and temperature in Sweden, which can be used for exposure estimation in epidemiological research and for health impact assessments. Well-functioning procedures are already in place for application, review of requests and delivery of data from EXPO.

Our proposed project will develop the methodology for estimation of daily air pollution and temperature levels covering the whole of Sweden, by increasing the spatial resolution to a grid size of 100 x 100 m, reducing imprecision in the exposure assessment and enabling more accurate risk estimates.

Furthermore, we will increase awareness of EXPO among researchers and risk assessors, to facilitate exploitation, by organizing conferences, establishing an international advisory board and a national collaboration group with data users and stakeholders.

The usefulness of EXPO will be enhanced by providing detailed methodological documentation, information on how to use the data as well as up-to-date evidence on exposure-response relationships.

The project is unique as EXPO includes high spatio-temporal resolution data on air pollution and temperature covering the whole of Sweden as well as data on transportation noise and green/blue spaces.

Our group has extensive collaboration with world-leading researchers using similar exposure assessment methodologies, which facilitates combined analyses and further methodological advances. The data in EXPO provide a crucial basis for decisions on prevention of environmental health hazards.