Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

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Transport Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tranpol

Near-airport distribution of the environmental costs of aviation

Philip J. Wolfe n, Steve H.L. Yim, Gideon Lee, Akshay Ashok, Steven R.H. Barrett, Ian A. Waitz
Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue,
Cambridge, MA, USA

art ic l e i nf o

a b s t r a c t

Available online 15 March 2014

Aircraft noise, air quality, and climate change damages are spatially and temporally heterogeneous.
While policymakers often focus on aggregate cost-benet analysis to examine tradeoffs in aviation
environmental policy, these analyses do not always indicate who bears the costs or who gains the
benets of aviation. We model both the net cost and distribution of environmental damages from one
year of aviation operations across the three environmental domains. We nd that populations living at
airport boundaries face damages of $100400 per person per year from aircraft noise and between $516
per person per year from climate damages (in 2006 dollars). Expected damages from air quality are
dependent on the number of operations at the airport and range from $20 to over $400 per person per
year with air quality damages approaching those of noise at high volume airports. Mean expected noise
and air quality damages decay with distance from the airport, but for noise, the range of expected
damages at a given distance can be high and depends on orientation with respect to runways and ight
patterns. Damages from aviation-induced climate change dominate those from local air quality
degradation and noise pollution further away from the airport. However, air quality damages may
exceed those from climate when considering the impact of cruise emissions on air quality.
& 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Keywords:
Aircraft noise
Air quality
Climate change
Aviation
Distributional analysis

1. Introduction
Over the past 50 years, the environmental impacts of aviation,
particularly noise, air quality, and climate change, have become
increasingly important. Aircraft noise can lead to physical and
monetary damages such as annoyance, sleep disturbance, and
property damage. Primary and secondary aerosols from aircraft
emissions lead to increased incidences of premature mortality and
morbidity. Aviation impacts the climate through long- and shortlived emissions species such as CO2, soot, and NOX, as well as
through induced changes in cloud cover.
Technological or operational decisions in aviation can represent
tradeoffs across these domains and with economic efciency. Costbenet analyses do not clearly articulate who bears the costs or
receives the benets of a specic policy. This can be especially
relevant in aviation where impacts of noise can be concentrated
while climate change impacts are spatially and temporally diffuse.
When policy impacts are not distributed equally, especially in the
spheres of environmental and occupational health and safety,
social equity concerns exist. The Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) recommends identifying the burden of policy costs and
addressing issues of environmental and social justice (EPA, 2010).

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: pwolfe@mit.edu (P.J. Wolfe).

Aircraft noise is the most readily perceived environmental

impact of aviation, and the rst to be regulated in 1971. Although
there has been further regulation since, aircraft noise is still the
greatest concern for communities living near airports (Durmaz,
2011). Noise is expected to remain the single largest aviation
environmental issue for the foreseeable future (GAO, 2000, 2007).
It is important to understand why aviation noise is the most
dominant complaint regarding airport expansion and to compare
the total environmental costs of aviation noise to the costs of other
domains. There are distributional concerns, a problem where one
effect like noise is felt more acutely by only a few people while
climate change and air quality are more dispersive, and there is the
issue of perception and the ability to attribute damages to aviation
as opposed to from other sources. An improvement and expansion
of aviation environmental impact analyses is necessary to understand these key issues.
This paper calculates how individuals bear the environmental
impacts of a year of aviation operations as a function of their distance
from an airport. Noise damages to population annoyance and
property value loss are related to day-night level noise contours
(dB DNL), which measure the average noise over a 24 h period.
Human health impacts from air pollution are related to absolute
concentrations of particulate matter in the air. In aggregate, primary
particulate emissions for a given class of operations scale closely with
fuel burn, which scales with the number of aircraft operations at an
airport. Therefore, we expect that damages from air quality on a per

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2014.02.023
0967-070X & 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

P.J. Wolfe et al. / Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

person basis will be more sensitive to airport size, on an operational

basis. We quantify the expected burden of environmental costs
around an airport as a function of the number of aircraft operations.
Our environmental analysis is limited to the domains of climate
change, local air quality degradation, and noise pollution. Aircraft
deicing, fuel spills, herbicides to manage aircraft grounds, and
surface runoff from ground support can impact the quality of
groundwater and waterways surrounding the airport. Air transportation can also effect the environment through bird and surface
wildlife strikes and their associated mitigation procedures (Martin
et al., 2011) and through direct and induced land use change
changes surrounding the airport. These impacts are outside the
scope of this analysis.
A number of studies have investigated the air quality impacts of
aviation through modeling or eld data analysis. However, these
studies focus on a limited number of pollutants or pollutant
precursors (Farias and ApSimon, 2006) or are limited to a few
airports (Diez et al., 2012; Dodson et al., 2009; Unal et al., 2005).
Multi-airport studies have either aggregate damages to human
health by airport or global region (Barrett et al., 2010; Levy et al.,
2012) or are at too coarse a resolution to capture local-scale
impacts (Woody et al., 2011). In addition, local studies have
focused entirely on primary particulates, ignoring the diffuse
impact of secondary particulates.
Noise impacts of aviation on local communities have been
estimated using both contingent valuation (Navrud, 2002) and
hedonic pricing methods. While most hedonic pricing studies have
focused on individual airports, meta-studies including Schipper
et al. (1998), Nelson (2004), and Wadud (2009) have examined
more generalized relationships between noise exposure and
societal damages. He et al. (in this issue) examines US and global
noise damages at a global aggregate and per airport basis, but does
not directly examine spatial distribution on the local level.
Studies examining aviation damages across environmental
domains on a common scale are limited. Lu and Morrell (2006)
investigated the environmental impact of noise and engine emissions
at ve European airports on a monetary cost basis. Their analysis
focused on per-ight marginal damages and airport level aggregation, and did not investigate the spatial distribution of damages.
Furthermore, they do not differentiate between climate and air
quality emissions damages, only consider cruise impacts for one
species (NOX), and valuate impacts by emission species and not by
pollutant concentration. They similarly nd that, in aggregate, the
costs from engine emissions exceed those of noise. Mahashabde et al.
(2011) examined the difference in expected monetized environmental benets for climate, air quality, and noise for several NOX
stringency policies at a national aggregate level.

2. Methodology
This section lays out how expected damages per person are
calculated as a function of distance from an airport for a year of
aviation operations across three environmental spheres of interest:
noise, air quality, and climate. The domain is limited to US airports.
We quantify the expected burden of environmental costs around an
airport as a function of the number of aircraft operations.
2.1. Noise
The contribution to monetized damages from aircraft noise is
calculated using the APMT-Impacts Noise Module (He et al., in this
issue). The APMT-Impacts Noise Module overlays noise contours
and population data and then applies a monetization formula
based on willingness-to-pay for noise abatement. This monetization is derived from a meta-analysis of residential housing hedonic

103

pricing surveys that correlates willingness-to-pay per dB of noise

reduced to citywide income levels. We take expected damages
from the APMT-Impacts Noise Module and map them to the
airport region being considered. Noise contours for 2006 are taken
at a 50 m
50 m resolution from AEDT/MAGENTA (Roof, 2007).
Noise levels are generated in contours at 5 dB DNL resolution, with
an estimated contour uncertainty of 72 dB (He, 2010). Population
data are taken at the US census block group level.
The APMT-Impacts Noise Module does not monetize the impact
of aviation on noise on areas with low background noise levels, such
as national parks (Gramann, 1999; Lim et al., 2008). These areas may
be susceptible to damage from overhead ights, and are considered
critical research areas (Eagan et al., 2011). There are some limitations
to utilizing the APMT-Impacts Noise Module for estimating geographic distribution of damages. While sensitivity analyses performed by He (2010) show code robustness and comparable results
to an alternative valuation model described by Kish (2008), no
comparison has been performed to show sensitivity on a grid
distance level basis. Furthermore, traditional noise damage indices
may not be applicable for noise contours above 75 dB DNL, leading to
underestimation of damages at very near airport locations (Feitelson
et al., 1996). Finally, because the APMT-Noise model was developed
using a limited set of airport noise studies, there is the opportunity
for generalization error in benet transfer to airports with a high
degree of dissimilarity from the airports in the meta-analysis.
2.2. Air quality
We use the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling
system (Byun and Schere, 2006) to model aviation emissionattributable PM2.5 in the continental United States. CMAQ is a highresolution regional air quality model used by the EPA to support
regulatory impact assessment. Total anthropologic and biogenic
emissions not including aviation are compiled from the EPA 2005
National Emissions Inventory (NEI) database. The meteorological
input for CMAQ modeling is generated by MM5 (Grell et al., 1994).
The CMAQ domain is a Lambert conformal projection of the
continental United States and parts of Canada and Mexico consisting
of 112
148 square grid cells at 36 km
36 km resolution.
The aviation emissions are derived from the FAA's Aviation
Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). AEDT calculates aircraft fuel
burn and emissions in 2006 on a ight-by-ight basis, covering
the majority of civil aviation. A procedure similar to that applied
by Barrett et al. (2012) is used to modify AEDT output for use in
our analysis. We apply the three-dimensional model of tropospheric chemistry driven by 2006 meteorological observations
from the Goddard Earth Observing System of the NASA Global
Modeling Assimilation Ofces (GEOS-Chem) to provide boundary
conditions to CMAQ simulations (Bey et al., 2001).
While CMAQ provides the average particulate matter concentration over a grid cell, its coarse resolution fails to capture local peak
concentrations. A rapid dispersion code (RDC) is applied to efciently
calculate the long-term mean concentration at a receptor point a
given distance away from an area source (Barrett and Britter, 2009).
The RDC requires dispersion parameters, shapes and locations of the
area source, as well as the emission rates. The dispersion parameters
are calculated from AERMOD with its preprocessor (AERMET). The
2006 upper-air soundings are obtained from the National Climatic
Database Center (NCDC) Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive
(IGRA). Hourly surface meteorology comes from the NCDC Integrated
Surface Database (ISD).
Emissions data for the RDC are obtained from the same AEDT
model used in the CMAQ modeling (Barrett et al., 2010). Only
ground-level primary PM emissions are included in the RDC
simulations. Ground-level emissions are summed for each airport
for all 365 days and assigned to either taxiway or runway sources

104

P.J. Wolfe et al. / Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

depending on emissions mode. Emissions from each ight mode

are equally apportioned across all available active taxiways or
runways respectively due to lack of available surface surveillance
data. Runway geographic information is provided by the AEDT
Airport Database (Volpe, 2011). Taxiways and terminal shapes and
locations are obtained by manually processing FAA airport
diagrams.
The RDC calculates local ground-level primary PM2.5 (black
carbon, organic carbon and primary sulfate), while the total
primary and secondary regional PM2.5 concentrations are obtained
from CMAQ. The results of these two models are integrated to
obtain total annual mean PM2.5 concentration following the
methodology of Isakov et al. (2007). This method is adopted to
estimate the total PM2.5 except the ground level emissions by
removing the ground level primary PM2.5 in the CMAQ results
from the spatial-averaged RDC concentrations in each CMAQ grid.
Health impacts of premature mortality and morbidity due to
PM2.5 exposure are calculated using population-weighted exposure concentration response functions derived from epidemiological studies (Brunelle-Yeung et al., in this issue). A 20-year
distributed cessation lag is used to model mortalities (Barrett
et al., 2012). A value of statistical life (VSL) for mortalities and cost
of illness (COI) consistent with EPA practices for each endpoint are
used to monetize air quality impacts (Rojo, 2007).
2.3. Climate change
Aviation impacts on climate change are diffuse and heterogeneous.
Radiative forcing from CO2 may be appropriately assumed to be
globally uniform, but NOXO3 pathways have signicant hemispherical imbalances and aviation-induced cloudiness can range from local
to continental scale (Lee et al., 2009). Furthermore, the surface
temperature change from climate change has signicant global variation, even for areas that experience the same radiative forcing. For the
distribution of damages near airports, damages are assumed to be
independent of distance from the airport for the distances of concern
(o20 km). Therefore, the national average damage per person is
taken as the average damage per person at all distances from an
airport.
Aviation's contribution to climate change is calculated using
APMT-Impacts Climate with a linear impulse function carbon cycle
adapted from the Bern carbon cycle and a two-layer ocean model
(Mahashabde et al., 2011). Impacts of short-lived emissions from
aviation including sulfates, soot, water vapor, and aviation induced
cloudiness are calculated using the methodology of Sausen et al.
(2005) with 2006 instantaneous forcings provided by Lee et al.
(2009). Impacts from NOX emissions include a short-lived NOXO3
pathway, a longer-lived NOXmethane pathway and an associated
longer-lived NOXO3 pathway and are calculated by sampling radiative forcing estimates and species lifetimes from a suite of NOX
studies from the literature as described by Mahashabde et al. (2011).
APMT-Impacts Climate uses the non-linear Dynamic Integrated
Climate Economy (DICE) 2007 damage functions to monetize
temperature effects (Nordhaus, 2008). The function includes losses
from damages to agriculture, sea-level rise, adverse health
impacts, nonmarket damages, and estimates of potential costs of
catastrophic damages. Monetary damages are computed by projections multiplying DICE damages, in percentage of Gross Domestic Product, by projections of the GDP from the IPCC Special Report
on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). US-only damages are calculated as
between 7% and 23% of global damages (IAWG, 2010).

uncertainty distributions from the literature as described elsewhere

(He et al., in this issue; Wolfe, 2012); APMT-Impacts Climate environmental costs are aggregated using Monte Carlo analysis with 10,000
draws from a quasi-random Sobol sequence (Sobol0 , 2001). The APMTImpacts Noise environmental costs are aggregated using Monte Carlo
analysis of 3500 pseudo-random samples. Global sensitivity analyses
and uncertainty quantications are performed by He (2010) and
Mahashabde et al. (2011). The local air quality concentrations are
computed deterministically, while the health impacts and valuations
are aggregated using a Monte Carlo analysis with 3000 pseudorandom samples using the methodology applied to the APMT-Air
Quality Response Surface Model (RSM) as described by Mahashabde
et al. (2011).
Using airport location coordinates from the FAA airports
database; damages are calculated at 5 m-intervals along 36 evenly
spaced radials originating from the airport. The mean damage and
the range of damages per person are characterized as a function of
distance from the airport and azimuth. We assess trends in airport
damages across 84 primary service commercial airports. These
airports match the 95 Shell-1 airports included in the noise
analysis by He et al. (in this issue) but exclude those airports in
Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii that fall outside the domain of the
continental air quality model.

3. Results
The baseline environmental impact of a year of operations
across the contiguous continental United States is shown in Fig. 1
on an aggregate basis at a 3% discount rate. The error bars
represent 5th to 95th percentile ranges of the aggregate yearly
damages. All damages are presented in 2006 USD unless otherwise
noted. Total environmental damages are $7.4 billion ($2.513.6
billion), with 71% (2990%) of these baseline damages coming
from future Climate change. These results indicate a social cost of
carbon (SCC) of $19/tCO2 ($930/tCO2) for CO2 impacts only from

2.4. Radial damage approach

APMT-Impacts Climate and APMT-Impacts Noise are both run
probabilistically along the entire emission-to-benet pathway using

Fig. 1. Environmental damages from one year of aviation operations on (a) a

national aggregate and (b) per person basis within 5 km of the airport.

P.J. Wolfe et al. / Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

APMT-Impacts Climate. For comparison, the Interagency Working

Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (IAWG) suggests $21/tCO2 as
the SCC at a 3% discount rate (IAWG, 2010). Total noise damages
from one year of operations at the 95 Shell-1 airports totals $0.63
billion ($0.390.91 billion). Taking an aggregate viewpoint, one
might assume that climate is the primary environmental impact of
concern for aviation. However, 7793% of these climate damages
may occur outside the United States (IAWG, 2010).
The impacts of aviation noise and emissions are not distributed
evenly in the near-airport region, dened here as within 20 km
from a primary-service airport. Individual airports show an exponential relationship between expected per person damages from
airport noise and distance of the form y ae  bx, where y is
expected damage per person in 2006 US dollars and x is distance
from an airport in meters. For air quality, the wider geographic
extent of damages from secondary particulate matter leads to a
relationship that can be approximated by the sum of two exponentials of the form yae  bx ce  dx, where y is expected damage
per person in 2006 US dollars and x is distance from an airport in
meters.
Results for three sample airports are shown in Fig. 2. The solid
lines indicate mean expected damages for a given distance from an
airport. The shaded regions indicate the extent of minimum and
maximum damages for a given distance.
Noise dominates the mean expected damages for regions near
airport boundaries with average expected damages at between
$100 and $400 per person per year for people near the airport
boundary. Air quality damages at smaller airports ( o75,000
operations) are found to be less than $20 per person per year,
equivalent to expected damages from climate impacts. However, at
airports with a large numbers of operations ( 4400,000), the
burdens of environmental damage from noise and air quality
converge at distances close to the airport at  $400 per person
per year. Climate damages are of the greatest concern as one
moves further away from the airport boundary, becoming dominant at between 2 km and 6 km, depending on airport size.
Minimum and maximum noise damage ranges at any distance
can be substantial as noise contours are typically not circular but
elongated along the directions of runways and ight paths while
annual air quality damages are more uniform as a function of
distance. The spatially non-uniform distribution of noise levels
and property values around airports leads to trends in the
minimum and maximum damages as a function of distance from
the airport that in general differ from the trends of mean damages
as a function of distance from the airport; all of which are airport
specic. For airports with a signicant number of operations,
populations living along radials aligned with runways or ight
paths may be exposed predominantly to damages from noise as
much as 20 km further away from the airport. While instantaneous air quality damages may strongly depend on specic surface
operations and meteorology, on an annual scale they are more
uniform as a function of distance than those damages from noise.
For a sample airport with more than 400,000 operations a year, the
coefcients for the relationship between expected damages and the
distance from the airport as well as the goodness of t of the
minimum, mean, and maximum damage curves are given in
Table 1. At the airport boundary, total yearly environmental damages
range from $290 per person to $1200 per person ($860 mean). At a
distance of 5 km from the airport, mean expected damages decrease
to $86 per person, with some areas still experiencing greater than
$300 per person in expected damages.
The average expected damage from air quality at the airport
boundary is more sensitive to number of operations than the
average expected damage from noise. Fig. 3 shows the mean
expected damages at the airport boundary for environmental
impacts for the 84 airports examined. The results indicate that

105

Fig. 2. Distribution of near-airport aviation environmental impacts for (a) an

airport with 4400,000 commercial operations per year, (b) an airport with between
75,000 and 400,000 operations, and (c) an airport with o75,000 operations per year.

noise is the expected primary driver of near-airport aviation

environmental impacts across the range of operations considered,
but that air quality overtakes noise as the dominant driver at 1.25
million operations per year.
This analysis does not consider the contribution of cruise
emissions to near-airport local air quality. Barrett et al. (2010)
estimated that 80% of total air quality impacts from aviation are
attributable to cruise emissions. We take an increased concentration of 0.05 mg/m3 as an upper bound of the contribution of cruise
emissions to near airport local air quality using the peak
mid-continental US concentration from Barrett et al. (2010) and
a mean contribution to US air quality from cruise emissions as

531 (506, 565)

 1.11 (  1.15,  1.07)
10  4
0
0
0.889
421 (419, 422)
 5.71 (  5.73,  5.70)
10  4
0
0
0.991
53.8 (36.3, 68.8)
 4.54 (  5.01,  4.02)
10  4
0
0
0.820
667 (644, 690)
 1.37 (  1.46,  1.30)
10  3
46.4 (36.5, 56.3)
 5.75 (  9.65,  3.94)
10  5
0.914
438 (431, 446)
 8.85 (  9.16,  8.53)
10  4
22.3 (16.5, 28.0)
 7.55 (  10.1,  4.95)
10  5
0.985
5.3516.8
0
0
0

a
b
c
d
R2

232 (229, 235)

 9.35 (  9.62,  9.09)
10  4
15.0 (9.38, 20.7)
 2.03 (  2.77,  1.29)
10  4
0.950

Air quality (max)

Air quality (mean)
Air quality (min)
Climate
Coeff.

Table 1
Damage coefcients for a sample airport 4400,000 operations (95% condence intervals).

Noise (min)

Noise (max)

P.J. Wolfe et al. / Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

Noise (mean)

106

Fig. 3. Mean of expected damages at the airport boundary as a function of number

of operations on a loglog scale.

Fig. 4. Sensitivity to Inclusion of Cruise Impacts (75400k operations per year).

Solid lines represent nominal results; dashed line represents inclusion of cruise
impacts.

0.0118 mg/m3 from Koo et al. (2013). Contributions from cruise

emissions to expected damages for an airport with between
75,000 and 400,000 operations are shown in Fig. 4. For airports
of this size, inclusion of cruise impacts does not shift the primary
driver of environmental damages at the airport boundary. At
distances greater than 6 km from the airport, on average the
inclusion of cruise does not make damages from aviationinduced changes in air quality greater than those from climate
change. However, in considering areas of peak concentrations
from cruise emissions, such as over the eastern US and the
northern Midwest, inclusion of cruise emissions does make
aviation-induced changes in air quality the largest contributor to
environmental damages at distances greater than 6 km from the
airport (  $31/person).
Damage valuations are highly sensitive to choice of discount
rate. The United States Ofce of Management and Budget recommends using a range of discount rates from 2% to 7% in regulatory
analysis (OMB, 2003). For climate, damages can extend hundreds
of years into the future, so the present value of expected damages
increases for decreasing discount rate. The inclusion of the

P.J. Wolfe et al. / Transport Policy 34 (2014) 102108

mortality cessation lag distributes the damages from air quality

over 20 years, making air quality less sensitive to discount rate
than climate damages. A drop in the discount rate from 3% to 2%
leads to an increase in average per person climate damages of 55%
and an increase in per person air quality damages of 6%. Increasing
the discount rate to 7% leads to a decrease in average per person
climate damages of 47% and a decrease in average per person air
quality damages of 16%. Because noise impacts on housing are
calculated in capitalized damages and converted to annual impacts
using a capital recovery factor, changes in discount rate have a
countervailing impact. A discount rate of 7% results in yearly noise
damages that are 58% greater than those at 3%.

107

1% of the EPA estimates for mortality benets over the same

period (adjusted to 2001 dollars) (EPA, 1997). The costs of aviation
air quality impacts on housing values make up less than 10% of
damages from even the more conservatively low assessments of
air quality mortality benets over the same period (Matus et al.,
2008). These low costs to housing indicate that tracking air quality
impacts on health is sufcient for monetizing air quality damages.
However, if air quality is not accounted for in the choice of noise
hedonic, damages attributed to noise may be attributable to air
quality or to the combination of their environmental impacts.

Acknowledgments
4. Conclusions and discussion
We computed near-airport impacts of noise, air quality and
climate change from aviation operations. Noise damages are found
to dominate the per person expected environmental impact at
near-airport distances (o 6 km). Because expected air quality
damages are more sensitive to the number of local operations,
air quality damages are expected to comprise a greater percentage
of the burden at larger airports, eventually overtaking noise as the
dominant environmental impact at airports with greater than 1.25
million operations per year. At distances greater than 6 km,
damages from climate change or air quality damages from cruise
emissions dominate environmental costs. On a per person basis,
noise damages dominate as the average person within 5 km of an
airport bears $41 a year in damages ($2559). While noise is
currently the primary environmental impact of concern with
respect to airport expansion, these results indicate that as airports
become larger the impact of concern may shift to air quality.
Regional and local scale analyses of aviation environmental
impacts are therefore important and should be used to supplement aggregate cost-benet analyses of aviation environmental
policies.
The APMT-Impacts Noise model does not calculate the physical
health impacts of aviation-related noise such as sleep disorders,
cardiovascular disease, or hypertension (Jarup et al., 2008). While
the hedonic pricing method is expected to capture some of these
impacts through property value loss, full capture is not expected as
it would imply that individuals have full comprehension of the
differences in property value, health impacts, and changes in
quality of life associated with the noise increase (EPA, 2010). The
air quality damage function models only the direct impacts on
human health endpoints from small particulates, and does not
consider pollution impacts on land use, agriculture, wildlife, and
visibility or the health impacts of ozone production. Aviationinduced air pollution impact on visibility may contribute 1535%
of impacted populations' willingness-to-pay for abatement
(Delucchi et al., 2002). The climate damage function adapted from
the DICE model (Nordhaus, 2008) values climate damages to
agriculture, sea level rise, other market sectors, human health,
nonmarket amenity impacts, human settlements and ecosystems,
and catastrophes. On a population-weighted basis, human health
and catastrophes contribute to 85% of the expected damages for
2.5 1C of warming. Furthermore, this methodology does not take
into account potential interactions across the different environmental domains. For instance, health impact interactions of noise
and air quality may have synergistic (adverse) effects, leading to
higher expected damages at near-airport distances.
Finally, several studies show a relationship between housing
value and local air quality (Smith and Huang, 1995; Chay and
Greenstone, 1998). Savings to the housing market from US air
quality improvements between 1970 and 1980 are estimated at
$45 billion (in 2001 dollars) (Chay and Greenstone, 1998), less than

This work is funded by the US Federal Aviation Administration

Ofce of Environment and Energy. The project is managed by
Maryalice Locke of the FAA. Any opinions, ndings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reect the views of the FAA.
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