Prometheus Framework for Public Policy Decisions on Environmental Health Risks

Wildfires, suspended soil and other particulates, and industrial emissions combine to raise the urgency of air quality as a planetary threat. This paper introduces Prometheus, a proactive decision-making framework for managing environmental and health risks associated with air pollution and climate change. The framework integrates causality analyses with data-driven methods, enabling the anticipation of consequences and proactive countermeasures for a variety of threats. The framework thus improves resilience to potential disasters and improves societal wellbeing by including scientific expertise and causality-driven analytics into policy making processes. A case demonstration with air pollution of Beijing, China, illustrates the features of the framework to address non-obvious and complex interactions of factors for a mega-region