Principal Investigator Noelle Selin
Informing policy responses to air pollution often requires cost-benefit and regulatory analysis, which is widely used in U.S. decision-making. We use integrated assessment and other techniques to quantify the economic impacts of future pollution. Using economic model components of the MIT Integrated Global System Model framework, coupled with full-scale atmospheric chemistry simulations, we quantified the health and economic impacts of future ozone pollution (Selin et al., 2009), and calculated the economic impacts of air pollution in Europe (Nam et al. 2010) and China (Matus et al., 2012).
From a policy perspective, our work has also addressed the ways in which policy-makers use scientific information. We showed that policies to address mercury, for example, often fail to address issues that span long timescales (Selin, 2011), and that the new global mercury treaty (The Minamata Convention) will likely result in avoided emissions increases globally. A key element of effective research in this area, from an engineering perspective, involves identifying best practices in designing and managing system interventions, including multi-stakeholder decision-making. In this area, which relates to sustainability, we are working as part of the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at MIT.
Funding for this work comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and the Center for Complex Engineering Systems. Group members involved in this work include Rebecca Saari, Amanda Giang, Evan Couzo, Ellen Czaika, and Leah Stokes.