Relationship between air pollutants and economic development of the provincial capital cities in China during the past decade.

Xiaoyan Yang,Yunpeng Luo,Huai Chen,Yao Zhang,Changhui Peng,Gang Yang,Yanzheng Yang,Qiu'An Zhu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104013

Abstract

With the economic development of China, air pollutants are also growing rapidly in recent decades, especially in big cities of the country. To understand the relationship between economic condition and air pollutants in big cities, we analysed the socioeconomic indictorssuch as Gross Regional Product per capita (GRP per capita), the concentration of air pollutants (PM10, SO2, NO2) and the air pollution index (API) from 2003 to 2012 in 31 provincial capitals of mainland China. The three main industries had a quadratic correlation with NO2, but a negative relationship with PM10 and SO2. The concentration of air pollutants per ten thousand yuan decreased with the multiplying of GRP in the provinical cities. The concentration of air pollutants and API in the provincial capital cities showed a declining trend or inverted-U trend with the rise of GRP per capita, which provided a strong evidence for the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), that the environmental quality first declines, then improves, with the income growth. The results of this research improved our understanding of the alteration of atmospheric quality with the increase of social economy and demonstrated the feasibility of sustainable development for China.

Highlights

China has seen economic soaring in the past three decades, with its gross domestic product (GDP) expanding 140 times during 1978–2012 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2013)
The NO2 concentration rose with the increase of the output per capita of the secondary and tertiary industries at the first stage, began to decrease when the output reached around 45,000 and 70,000 yuan respectively
The results indicated that all the three industries had significantly negative relationship with the concentration of PM10 and SO2

Summary

Introduction

China has seen economic soaring in the past three decades, with its gross domestic product (GDP) expanding 140 times during 1978–2012 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2013). Such economic soaring is accompanied with deterioration of the atmospheric quality. In the first three months of 2013, just like what happened in London in 1952 [1], long-time haze influenced large area of China (Fig S1), which further stimulated the strong demand for improvement of air quality. Air pollution has significant influence on both climate and human health [2,3]. Given the great influece of air pollution on natural environment and human life, researches are attaching ever greater importance to the causes and effects of air pollution [4,15,16,17]

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion