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Identify the measures needed to significantly reduce urban air pollution and its impacts.

Urban air pollution is a major public health issue, causing 48,000 deaths per year and resulting in costs of 100 billion euros per year in France. ACME (formerly MobilAir), through a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach, aims to identify specific measures to significantly reduce urban air pollution and its impacts. Drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of the University of Grenoble Alpes, ACME is developing an integrated approach within the Grenoble metropolitan area.

The Issues

ACME aims to:

• Better characterize the population’s exposure to pollution by using, not the mass of fine particles, but the oxidizing potential—which takes into account the specific chemical composition of the particles—in assessing the health impact of various emission sources.
• Identify the economic and psychological factors that can bring about lasting changes in individual behavior.
• Develop a multidimensional and interdisciplinary tool for evaluating measures in terms of their impact on reducing pollution, specifically regarding particulate matter concentrations, health, traffic, individual mobility, as well as their effects on low-income households and inequalities in exposure to pollution.

Interdisciplinarity

An interdisciplinary approach combining environmental epidemiology, chemistry, and atmospheric modeling will assess the oxidizing potential of various emission sources in the Grenoble metropolitan area (indoor and outdoor air) and their health impacts on participants in a cohort study. A first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial will examine the role of economic, contextual (location of activities, urban planning, etc.), and psychological (perception, intention, altruism, social norms, etc.) factors in mobility behaviors. The development of the multidimensional decision-support tool will, in turn, integrate all the disciplines involved in the project.

The site's structure...

Never before has such an interdisciplinary project been undertaken to study air pollution, its sources, its impacts, and ways to reduce it. The ACME project combines modeling, environmental measurements, population surveys, cohorts and their biobanks, health impact studies, and interventions involving several hundred households, within a consortium of researchers—each working on one or more aspects related to air pollution (economists, psychologists, geographers, atmospheric chemists, epidemiologists, and atmospheric and transportation modelers)—in collaboration with local and regional authorities.

... and its international visibility

Urban air pollution has become a major problem in cities across both the Global North and the Global South. Drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of the University of Grenoble Alpes (
), ACME will develop an integrated approach in the Grenoble metropolitan area, a relevant pilot zone. The project is nevertheless intended to develop methods and tools that can be replicated in other cities in France or abroad.