The role of exposure assessment in development of risk reduction strategies for air quality

The relationship between deteriorated outdoor air quality and human health is one of the most studied environmental health issues. The concept of exposure, the link between environmental status and human health, has emerged in the late 1970's, recognizing that fixed monitoring stations do not represent concentrations at the places where persons spend time. Many advances have been made since. Characterizing the individual's exposure reduces uncertainty in links with health, but it implies a question about how exposure (as opposed to directly using concentrations) can be used in the regulatory process. This thesis addresses exposure assessment from several perspectives, with the aim to address its role in air quality management. We are interested in how to use exposure information for policy- and decision making, we investigate if a European-level subgroup-based exposure estimate can provide useful information for designing differentiated measures to protect specific groups, we design an exposure estimate for risk assessment in a specific situation with limited health and air pollution data, and we describe the challenges of the inherent inter-disciplinarity and suggest how to deal with them. We introduce the "full chain" approach to environmental health that links policy - pollution source -..