{"doi":"10.1111/ina.13028","title":"Open database for international and national indoor environmental quality guidelines","abstract":"The United Nations has mandated clean air as a human right.1 In addition, many influential international and national organizations have declared the right to a healthy environment.2 There is growing evidence that projected climate change has the potential to significantly affect public health directly or indirectly. Developing effective mitigation policies for residential and non-residential environments requires a better understanding of how parameters that affect indoor environmental quality (IEQ) (i.e., indoor air quality, ventilation, thermal comfort, noise, and lighting) interact, and how current and emerging trends in building construction, materials, infrastructure design, and use may affect these IEQ parameters and hence our health and wellbeing.3, 4 In this context, developing IEQ guidelines and setting standards are at the very core of defining and providing clean and healthy indoor environments. Globally, there is no consensus about IEQ standards, regulations, or guidelines. However, national regulations and guidelines from some individual countries and guidelines from professional organizations exist, as well as IEQ guidelines developed by international agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO). While regulations are enforced by the law of a country, guidelines are voluntary. Obtaining and referencing individual countries’ existing IEQ regulations or guidelines are useful for policy makers, scientists, and practitioners globally. However, getting access to such information can be challenging, for example, due to language barriers and the lack of an open database. Prior to the 2018 Indoor Air conference, a group of International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ) members discussed the challenges of international IEQ guidelines. They noted that using the existing guidelines in an international context opens many questions about the applicability of the guidelines in different settings, their comparability, and limitations. To help overcome these challenges, an ISIAQ Scientific and Technical Committee (STC34) was initiated in September 2020. The committee aims to continuously monitor, collect, and organize information about IEQ guidelines worldwide, and to develop IEQ recommendations. In 2021, STC34 created an open IEQ database that is freely accessible through our website, www.ieqguidelines.org. Currently, the database is focused on indoor air quality (IAQ) parameters. In 2022, we intend to extend the database to include standards, regulations, and guidelines related to ventilation, comfort, acoustics, and lighting. The current database includes information from over 30 countries, mostly from Asia and Europe. At present, we have no data from the African continent (Figure 1). There are over 70 individual indoor air pollutants in the database. Overall, the regulations and guidelines for indoor air pollutants assembled in the current IEQ database present great diversity and complexity, not only among countries, but also within countries. The practice showed that they are not always used to achieve the best impact. In addition, not all countries have government-regulated IEQ standards (i.e., permitted levels of indoor air pollutants). There are countries where specific premises, like schools or offices, are regulated. Moreover, there are countries, where government ordinances regulate many pollutants, but there are limited procedures to enforce such laws. Occupational exposure limits (OELs) for workplaces cover a much wider range of chemicals, are set at high time-averaged concentrations, and applied to healthy adults who are exposed over time at workplaces. Therefore, the IEQ database does not include OELs since they are not appropriate for the general population, which includes vulnerable groups such as children and the elderly. There are health-based guideline values for a limited number of indoor air pollutants issued by the WHO5, 6 and other health organizations worldwide. WHO has recently","journal":"Indoor Air","year":2022,"id":296641,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":23,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.942,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":983957,"name":"Linda Hägerhed","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983515,"name":"Sani Dimitroulopoulou","orcid":"0000-0001-9913-1526","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983516,"name":"Marzenna R. Dudzińska","orcid":"0000-0002-1230-957X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983517,"name":"Steven J. Emmerich","orcid":"0000-0002-3848-9249","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983958,"name":"David Hemming","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":388105,"name":"Ju‐Hyeong Park","orcid":"0000-0003-4419-9341","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983518,"name":"Ulla Haverinen‐Shaughnessy","orcid":"0000-0002-9456-7256","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983514,"name":"Oluyemi Toyinbo","orcid":"0000-0001-6425-9116","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":3,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:16.555318Z","pmid":"35481936","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}