Page - 4 - in options, Volume winter 2017/2018

research newsiiasa research www.iiasa.ac.at4 options ◼ winter 2017/18 I n the last two years it has come to light that carmakers have installed devices to trick emissions tests. This has led to emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) that are 4 to 7 times higher on the road than in test situations. But what difference does it make? In a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers have now calculated the health impact that these excess emissions have in Europe. They find that about 5,000 premature deaths each year can be attributed to excess NOx emissions from diesel vehicles, and could thus have been avoided. NOx is a precursor to fine particulate matter that leads to respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and this particulate air pollution causes about 425,000 premature deaths each year in Europe. In the new study, the researchers calculated how many of these premature deaths are caused by NOx emissions from diesel, and the difference between the stated emissions from diesel cars and their real driving emissions. Italy has the highest risk both in absolute terms as well as per capita, the study finds. But smaller countries like Switzerland and Slovenia also have high per capita risks because of transboundary pollution imported from their bigger neighbors. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, shows the magnitude of emission “cheating” and the benefit to public health that stricter emission standards and their enforcement would offer. KL Further info Jonson JE, Borken-Kleefeld J, Simpson D, Nyiri A, Posch M, & Heyes C (2017). Impact of excess NOx emissions from diesel cars on air quality, public health and eutrophication in Europe. Environmental Research Letters 12: e094017. [pure.iiasa.ac.at/14823] Jens Borken-Kleefeld borken@iiasa.ac.at Population aging is a major concern for many countries. Unsustainable burdens on social support and healthcare systems could arise if a greater number of older people are dependent on a declining proportion of working-age people in the population. But according to a new IIASA study, population aging could slow down and even stop in some countries by mid- century. Traditional population projections categorize “old age” as a simple cutoff at age 65. But as life expectancies have increased, so too have the years that people remain healthy, active, and productive. In the last decade, IIASA researchers have published a large body of research showing that the very boundary of “old age” should shift with changes in life expectancy, and have introduced new measures of aging that are based on population characteristics, giving a more comprehensive view of population aging. The study combines these new measures with UN probabilistic population projections to produce a new set of age structure projections for four countries: China, Germany, Iran, and the USA. It shows that population aging would slow and then come to an end in China, Germany, and the USA well before the end of the century. Iran, which had an extremely rapid fall in fertility rate in the last 20 years, has an unstable age distribution and the results for the country were highly uncertain. “Both of these demographic techniques are relatively new, and together they give us a very different, and more nuanced picture of what the future of aging might look like,” says Warren Sanderson, a researcher at IIASA and Stony Brook University in the USA who wrote the article with Sergei Scherbov, leader of the Re-Aging Project at IIASA, and Patrick Gerland, chief of the mortality section of the Population Division of the UN. KL Further info Sanderson WC, Scherbov S, and Gerland P (2017). Probabilistic Population Aging PLOS ONE. [pure.iiasa.ac.at/14681] Warren Sanderson sanders@iiasa.ac.at The deadly impacts of “Dieselgate” An end to population aging?