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Abstract
China’s tremendous economic growth during the past three decades has resulted in worsening air quality in most of its cities. However, the spatiotemporal patterns and underlying drivers of air pollution in China remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we used stepwise regression to identify major socioeconomic, climatic, and urban form factors influencing air pollution in 69 major cities across China. Our results showed that social factors such as population size and density were positively correlated with emissions of PM2.5, PM10, NOx, and SO2. Economic factors such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP of secondary industry were positively correlated with industry and transportation emissions but negatively correlated with residential emissions of air pollutants. Urban form attributes such as measures of urban fragmentation and contiguity were important in explaining patterns of emissions from residential, power generation, and transportation sectors. As for climatic factors, higher precipitation, higher wind speed, and higher temperatures were all negatively correlated with air pollution levels. We also found that the effects of socioeconomic, climatic, and urban from factors on air pollution levels varied considerably among seasons and between the annual and seasonal scales. Our findings have useful implications for urban planning and management for controlling air pollution in China and beyond.
Highlights
Over the past three decades, rapid urbanization in China has been unprecedented in terms of both speed and scale and more than half of its population live in cities [1,2]
Recent studies have related these spatial patterns of air pollution to environmental and socioeconomic factors depending on distinSgusutaiinsahbeilidty 2m01e7,c9h, ax nFOisRmPEsE[R6R,1E6V–IE1W9]
Our results indicated that socioeconomic variables were the dominant factors in predicting industry and residential emissions of air pollutants, with population density being the most important factor for industry emissions (Figure 3)
Summary
Over the past three decades, rapid urbanization in China has been unprecedented in terms of both speed and scale and more than half of its population live in cities [1,2]. Increased SO2 emissions have mainly resulted from human activities, such as industrial emissions [12]. Emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO), and concentrations of ozone (O3) increased dramatically due to the increased number of vehicles [13], and were accompanied by an increase in emissions of greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2) [14,15]. Wind dissipates air polluta2notfs1i5n the city, and transports pollutants from industrial areas to urban areas [12,20].
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