Population-production-pollution nexus based air pollution management model for alleviating the atmospheric crisis in Beijing, China

Abstract

In recent years, increscent emissions in the city of Beijing due to expanded population, accelerated industrialization and inter-regional pollutant transportation have led to hazardous atmospheric pollution issues. Although a number of anthropogenic control measures have been put into use, frequent/severe haze events have still challenged regional governments. In this study, a hybrid population-production-pollution nexus model (PPP) is proposed for air pollution management and air quality planning (AMP) with the aim to coordinate human activities and environmental protection. A fuzzy-stochastic mixed quadratic programming method (FSQ) is developed and introduced into a PPP for tackling atmospheric pollution issues with uncertainties. Based on the contribution of an index of population-production-pollution, a hybrid PPP-based AMP model that considers employment structure, industrial layout pattern, production mode, pollutant purification efficiency and a pollution mitigation scheme have been applied in Beijing. Results of the adjustment of employment structure, pollution mitigation scheme, and green gross domestic product under various environmental regulation scenarios are obtained and analyzed. This study can facilitate the identification of optimized policies for alleviating population-production-emission conflict in the study region, as well as ameliorating the hazardous air pollution crisis at an urban level.