Abstract
This article estimates the impact of the “Clean Heating Plan in Northern China (2017–2021)” on air quality improvement. It is a significant policy to promote the clean heating rate in Northern China, while there is limited research into its effects. We used a difference-in-difference model to qualify the effects of this policy on the “2 + 26” cities. For this, we controlled factors such as economy, energy use, afforestation level, and weather. We found that: (1) the clean heating plan makes the “2 + 26” cities’ AQI index, PM2.5, PM10, NO2, and O3 significantly decrease; (2) the concentrations of SO2 and CO increase. After adjusting the treatment group and control group, the results are still robust. We believe that the rise of SO2 is due to the shortage of natural gas supply in the 2017–2018 heating season in China, which led to the blockage of clean heating. Therefore, in promoting clean heating in Northern China, it is necessary to strengthen the estimation of heating demand, fully consider the energy structures of different regions, and implement the “reform by gas”.
Highlights
Between Northern China and other provinces, there is a big gap in central heating areas
The daily average concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, CO, and O3 reflect the effect of implementing the clean heating policy on the control of air pollutants
We find that the implementation of the clean heating policy significantly reduces the concentration of pollutants and improves air quality during the heating season
Summary
Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the generation and emission mechanism of air pollutants, the difficulty of social system construction may increase and the support of data must be ensured On this basis, the quasi-natural experiment method can reduce the complexity of system construction and better reflect the causal relationship between policy implementation and air pollution in this paper. Researchers have conducted empirical analysis of some cities and believe that a clean heating policy can significantly reduce the concentration of air pollutants [8,22,23,24]. We propose a hypothesis: the implementation of clean heating policies can significantly reduce the concentration of air pollutants in the “2 + 26” cities
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