Air Pollution Policies Research Articles

Effects of China’s current Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan on air pollution patterns, health risks and mortalities in Beijing 2014–2018

Beijing is one of the most polluted cities in the world. However, the “Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan” (APPCAP), introduced since 2013 in China, has created an unprecedented drop in pollution concentrations for five major pollutants, except O3, with a significant drop in mortalities across most parts of the city. To assess the effects of APPCAP, air pollution data were collected from 35 sites (divided into four types, namely, urban, suburban, regional background, and traffic) in Beijing, from 2014 to 2018 and analyzed. Simultaneously, health-risk based air quality index (HAQI) and district-specific pollution (PM2.5 and O3) attributed mortality were calculated for Beijing. The results show that the annual PM2.5 concentration exceeded the Chinese national ambient air quality standard Grade II (35 μg/m3) in all sites, ranging from 88.5 ± 77.4 μg/m3 for the suburban site to 98.6 ± 89.0 μg/m3 for the traffic site in 2014, but was reduced to 50.6 ± 46.6 μg/m3 for the suburban site, and 56.1 ± 47.0 μg/m3 for the regional background in 2018. O3 was another most important pollutant that exceeded the Grade II standard (160 μg/m3) for a total of 291 days. It peaked at 311.6 μg/m3 in 2014 for the urban site and 290.6 μg/m3 in 2018 in the suburban site. APPCAP led to a significant reduction in PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2 and CO concentrations by 7.4, 8.1, 2.4, 1.9 and 80 μg/m3/year respectively, though O3 concentration was increased by 1.3 μg/m3/year during the five-years. HAQI results suggest that during the high pollution days, the more vulnerable groups, such as the children, and the elderly, should take additional precautions, beyond the recommendations currently put forward by Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center (BJMEMC). In 2014, PM2.5 and O3 attributed to 29,270 and 3,030 deaths respectively, though in 2018 their mortalities were reduced by 5.6% and 18.5% respectively. The highest mortality was observed in Haidian and Chaoyang districts, two of the most densely populated areas in Beijing. Beijing’s air quality has seen a dramatic improvement over the five-year period, which can be attributable to the implementation of APPCAP and the central government’s determination, with significant drops in the mortalities due to PM2.5 and O3 in parallel. To further improve air quality in Beijing, more stringent regulatory measures should be introduced to control volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and reduce O3 concentrations. Consistent air pollution control interventions will be needed to ensure long-term prosperity and environmental sustainability in Beijing, China’s most powerful city. This study provides a robust methodology for analyzing air pollution trends, health risks and mortalities in China. The crucial evidence generated forms the basis for the governments in China to introduce location-specific air pollution policy interventions to further reduce air pollution in Beijing and other parts of China. The methodology presented in this study can form the basis for future fine-grained air pollution and health risk study at the city-district level in China.

Effectiveness of air pollution standards in reducing mortality in India

India experiences some of the highest air pollution levels globally, with 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. In this paper, we estimate the relationship between air pollution policies in India and mortality for people of all ages and all causes. We estimate the relationship between mortality and two major air pollution regulations, the Supreme Court Action Plan (SCAP) and the Catalytic Converter (CC) policy. Although data for mortality in India have improved over time, the annual average mortality for many districts is volatile, with many outliers and missing values. After addressing these measurement issues in a difference-in-differences setup, we do not find evidence that the policies were effective in significantly reducing mortality. In an effort to understand the potential benefits of reducing pollution levels in India, we investigate the association of different pollution types with mortality. This analysis relies upon relatively recent satellite data on PM2.5 levels in India. We examine this relationship for India for the first time, using a fixed effects model in an attempt to address issues of endogeneity and measurement error. We find that PM2.5 levels are positively associated with mortality, with a 10% increase in pollution conditionally associated with a 2.0% increase in the mortality rate.

A high spatiotemporal resolution anthropogenic VOC emission inventory for Qingdao City in 2016 and its ozone formation potential analysis

Accurate and gridded emission inventories are crucial for better air quality modeling and air pollution policy making. As the economic center of the Shandong province and part of the first batch of open coastal cities in China, Qingdao has been frequently plagued by volatile organic compound (VOC) pollution along with its rapid economic development and urbanization in recent years. In this study, a high spatiotemporal resolution VOC emission inventory for Qingdao was established for the year 2016 using updated source-specific emission factors and the latest activity data for different sources. The anthropogenic sources considered in this study are classified into seven major sources and 46 subcategories. The results indicated that a total of 151.5 kt of VOCs were emitted in Qingdao in 2016. The three largest emission sources, industrial process, on-road mobile, and solvent use sources accounted for 49.9% 20.1%, and 14.1% of the total VOC emissions, respectively. Spatially, the Huangdao District (57.9 kt), the Chengyang District (15.4 kt), and Pingdu City (15.1 kt) were the top three emitters of VOCs. The high concentration of VOCs was mainly distributed in the central areas of Qingdao city and the emissions distribution was highly consistent with its road network. The maximum monthly VOC emissions occurred in June (14.4 kt) and the minimum monthly VOC emissions occurred mainly in February (9.5 kt). The uncertainties in the emission inventory were quantified using a Monte Carlo simulation provided by the Oracle Crystal Ball software. There exist relatively high uncertainties in the on-road mobile (-84.79%, 252.07%), biomass burning (-65.38%, 134.77%) and industrial process (-36.08%, 133.62%) sources. For the complicated species and different reaction rates of ozone formation, the control of the amount of VOCs emitted and the highly reactive VOCs are equally important. Based on the emissions of individual VOC species and the corresponding maximum incremental reactivity (MIR), the ozone formation potential (OFP) profiles of Qingdao City were constructed. The results indicated that alkenes/alkynes and aromatics contributed the most to the OFP and that m/p-xylene, ethylene, propylene, formaldehyde, toluene, trans-2-butene, cis-2-butene, 1-butene, o-xylene, and 1-pentene were the top 10 individual VOC species contributing to the OFP. The contribution of industrial process and on-road mobile sources accounted for 37.5% and 24.5% of the total OFP in Qingdao City, respectively. Both the large VOC emission and OFP indicate that the focus of VOC emission control should be on industrial process and on-road mobile sources in Qingdao City.

Right to the Source: The Origin of Federal Air Pollution Policy

Right to the Source: The Origin of Federal Air Pollution Policy

The emotive effect of government branding on citizens' trust and its boundaries: Does the personal relevance of the policy issue matter?

AbstractRecent studies have demonstrated the potency of government branding to enhance citizens' trust in government organizations and policies. In addition, studies have pointed to the detrimental implications of this emotive effect, mainly its ability to compensate for organizations' poor functioning, and accordingly to elicit undue trust. In light of these concerns, this study explores the boundaries of governments' persuasion of citizens through branding and symbolic communications. Building on social psychology and marketing research, I hypothesize that citizens are less susceptible to persuasion by branding the more they perceive the policy issue as personally relevant. I test this expectation through a survey experiment, focused on air pollution policy in Israel, exploiting the natural variation in the perceived personal relevance between citizens residing in a polluted area in the country and others. The results indicate that even high levels of perceived personal relevance do not attenuate the effect of symbolic brand elements. This means that the boundaries of persuasion and manipulation through branding are wider than expected.

Remote biomass burning dominates southern West African air pollution during the monsoon

Abstract. Vast stretches of agricultural land in southern and central Africa are burnt between June and September each year, which releases large quantities of aerosol into the atmosphere. The resulting smoke plumes are carried west over the Atlantic Ocean at altitudes between 2 and 4 km. As only limited observational data in West Africa have existed until now, whether this pollution has an impact at lower altitudes has remained unclear. The Dynamics-aerosol-chemistry-cloud interactions in West Africa (DACCIWA) aircraft campaign took place in southern West Africa during June and July 2016, with the aim of observing gas and aerosol properties in the region in order to assess anthropogenic and other influences on the atmosphere. Results presented here show that a significant mass of aged accumulation mode aerosol was present in the southern West African monsoon layer, over both the ocean and the continent. A median dry aerosol concentration of 6.2 µg m−3 (standard temperature and pressure, STP) was observed over the Atlantic Ocean upwind of the major cities, with an interquartile range from 5.3 to 8.0 µg m−3. This concentration increased to a median of 11.1 µg m−3 (8.6 to 15.7 µg m−3) in the immediate outflow from cities. In the continental air mass away from the cities, the median aerosol loading was 7.5 µg m−3 (5.9 to 10.5 µg m−3). The accumulation mode aerosol population over land displayed similar chemical properties to the upstream population, which implies that upstream aerosol is a significant source of aerosol pollution over the continent. The upstream aerosol is found to have most likely originated from central and southern African biomass burning. This demonstrates that biomass burning plumes are being advected northwards, after being entrained into the monsoon layer over the eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean. It is shown observationally for the first time that they contribute up to 80 % to the regional aerosol loading in the monsoon layer over southern West Africa. Results from the COSMO-ART (Consortium for Small-scale Modeling – Aerosol and Reactive Trace gases) and GEOS-Chem models support this conclusion, showing that observed aerosol concentrations over the northern Atlantic Ocean can only be reproduced when the contribution of transported biomass burning aerosol is taken into account. As a result, the large and growing emissions from the coastal cities are overlaid on an already substantial aerosol background. Simulations using COSMO-ART show that cloud droplet number concentrations can increase by up to 27 % as a result of transported biomass burning aerosol. On a regional scale this renders cloud properties and precipitation less sensitive to future increases in anthropogenic emissions. In addition, such high background loadings will lead to greater pollution exposure for the large and growing population in southern West Africa. These results emphasise the importance of including aerosol from across country borders in the development of air pollution policies and interventions in regions such as West Africa.

Anthropogenic aerosol forcing under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Abstract. Emissions of anthropogenic aerosols are expected to change drastically over the coming decades, with potentially significant climate implications. Using the most recent generation of harmonized emission scenarios, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) as input to a global chemistry transport and radiative transfer model, we provide estimates of the projected future global and regional burdens and radiative forcing of anthropogenic aerosols under three contrasting pathways for air pollution levels: SSP1-1.9, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0. We find that the broader range of future air pollution emission trajectories spanned by the SSPs compared to previous scenarios translates into total aerosol forcing estimates in 2100 relative to 1750 ranging from −0.04 in SSP1-1.9 to −0.51 W m−2 in SSP3-7.0. Compared to our 1750–2015 estimate of −0.55 W m−2, this shows that, depending on the success of air pollution policies and socioeconomic development over the coming decades, aerosol radiative forcing may weaken by nearly 95 % or remain close to the preindustrial to present-day level. In all three scenarios there is a positive forcing in 2100 relative to 2015, from 0.51 in SSP1-1.9 to 0.04 W m−2 in SSP3-7.0. Results also demonstrate significant differences across regions and scenarios, especially in South Asia and Africa. While rapid weakening of the negative aerosol forcing following effective air quality policies will unmask more of the greenhouse-gas-induced global warming, slow progress on mitigating air pollution will significantly enhance the atmospheric aerosol levels and risk to human health in these regions. In either case, the resulting impacts on regional and global climate can be significant.

Understanding the impacts of outdoor air pollution on social inequality: advancing a just transition framework

ABSTRACTOutdoor air pollution is a major environmental risk that caused over 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2016. In this article, we investigate how groups with lower social-economic status are disproportionally affected by outdoor air pollution. Based on a comparative case study of two heavily polluted urban areas around Beijing and Delhi, we find that people's economic welfare and political rights are affected disproportionally not only by toxic air pollutants, but also through various policy interventions, market activities, and social practices designed to reduce or adapt to air pollution. Drawing on the concepts of environmental justice and just transitions, we present an analytical framework for investigating the links between outdoor air pollution and social inequalities. The framework enables a better understanding of structural constraints, political constraints and protective constraints in the context of outdoor air pollution and their impacts on social vulnerabilities with particular relevance to fast industrialising countries. We also provide recommendations on how to design and implement air pollution policies and social interventions in a socially inclusive manner.

Air Pollution as a Cause of Obesity: Micro-Level Evidence from Chinese Cities.

Chinese air pollution is obviously increasing, and the government makes efforts to strengthen air pollution treatment. Although adverse health effects gradually emerge, research determining individual vulnerability is limited. This study estimated the relationship between air pollution and obesity. Individual information of 13,414 respondents from 125 cities is used in the analysis. This study employs ordinary least squares (OLS) and multinomial logit model (m-logit) to estimate the impact of air pollution on obesity. We choose different air pollution and Body Mass Index (BMI) indicators for estimation. Empirical results show Air Quality Index (AQI) is significantly positively associated with the BMI score. As AQI adds one unit, the BMI score increases 0.031 (SE = 0.002; p < 0.001). The influence coefficients of particle size smaller than 2.5 μm (PM2.5), particle size smaller than 10 μm (PM10), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) to the BMI score are 0.034 (SE = 0.002; p < 0.001), 0.023 (SE = 0.001; p < 0.001), 0.52 (SE = 0.095; p < 0.001), 0.045 (SE = 0.004; p < 0.001), 0.021 (SE = 0.002; p < 0.001), 0.008 (SE = 0.003; p = 0.015), respectively. Generally, air pollution has an adverse effect on body weight. CO is the most influential pollutant, and female, middle-aged, and low-education populations are more severely affected. The results confirm that the adverse health effects of air pollution should be considered when making the air pollution policies. Findings also provide justification for health interventions, especially for people with obesity.

Fine particulate matter damages and value added in the US economy

Emissions of most pollutants that result in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) formation have been decreasing in the United States. However, this trend has not been uniform across all sectors or regions of the economy. We use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to compute marginal damages for PM2.5-related emissions for each county in the contiguous United States and match location-specific emissions with these marginal damages to compute economy-wide gross external damage (GED) due to premature mortality. We note 4 key findings: First, economy-wide, GED has decreased by more than 20% from 2008 to 2014. Second, while much of the air pollution policies have focused to date on the electricity sector, damages from farms are now larger than those from utilities. Indeed, farms have become the largest contributor to air pollution damages from PM2.5-related emissions. Third, 4 sectors, comprising less than 20% of the national gross domestic product (GDP), are responsible for ∼75% of GED attributable to economic activities. Fourth, uncertainty in GED estimates tends to be high for sectors with predominantly ground-level emissions because these emissions are usually estimated and not measured. These findings suggest that policymakers should target further emissions reductions from such sectors, particularly in transportation and agriculture.

Keeping air pollution policies on track.

Focusing on trends rather than compliance can lead to more effective policies

Going beyond thresholds in air quality

Environment Millions of people around the world die prematurely as a result of air pollution. Many air pollution policies focus on regulatory thresholds that must not be exceeded. In a Perspective, Fuller and Font argue that it may be more effective to focus on rates of change in air pollutants instead. Trend analysis can help to assess the effectiveness of policies for human health improvement, as long as confounding factors such as weather variability, data gaps, and monitoring limitations are addressed. Policies can also be made more effective by including legal requirements to improve air quality even when legal limits are met. Science , this issue p. [322][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaw9865

Interactions between Climate and Local Air Pollution Policies: The Case of European Passenger Cars

Many European countries have adopted carbon dioxide–based (CO2-based) vehicle taxes to help reduce transportation sector emissions. The literature has shown that these policies reduce CO2 emissions but has not considered whether they affect emissions that harm local air quality. This paper analyzes whether CO2-based taxes have an unintended consequence of raising emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulates, which harm local air quality. Using highly detailed data on European new vehicle registrations from 2002 through 2010, I estimate the effects of fuel costs and vehicle taxes on consumer vehicle choices. The CO2-based vehicle taxes reduce CO2 emissions but increase NOx and particulates emissions. The environmental harms from the NOx and particulates emissions roughly offset the benefits of the lower CO2 emissions. Because of the estimated substitution patterns, fuel-based CO2 taxes introduce milder trade-offs than do vehicle taxes.

The value of a statistical life in Mexico

ABSTRACTMexico has been making an increased use of cost–benefit analyses to inform its public policy decisions, in line with other OECD countries. The monetary values used in these analyses have generally been based on benefit transfer methods. There are several reasons to be cautious about the use of benefit transfer values, including that the resulting figures from the procedure can vary widely depending on assumptions. This is particularly pressing where large allocation decisions are at stake, as tends to be the case with air pollution policy and climate change policy. This study collected primary data to produce a value of statistical life for Mexico, using a questionnaire previously employed in several countries, including in the USA (where benefit transfer values tend to be sourced from by Mexican authorities). The analysis produces a value of statistical life of USD 210,880. The evidence suggests that benefit transfer values currently being used by Mexican authorities are being driven by the source values themselves, rather than by inappropriate assumptions about income elasticities or by being affected unduly by other factors. The conclusions offer some recommendations for future use of value of statistical life figures in Mexico.

Development of a fleet emissions control (FEC) framework for passenger cars

The composition and size of the passenger car fleet is often influenced by legislation and policy, including taxation, scrappage, and vehicle registration policies. Numerous measures at national and international level have been investigated to reduce the air pollution and/or climate change impacts of passenger fleets. However, the objectives of climate change and air pollution policy occasionally are conflicting, and this has resulted in a number of well publicised policy shortcomings. This paper outlines the development of a fleet emissions control (FEC) framework which enables the dynamic and adaptive optimisation of fleet emissions through changes in taxation policy in Ireland. The data for analysis was obtained from national sources including datasets from the national emission inventory and COPERT model. Applications of regression-based modelling and statistical analysis were conducted to predict fleet, mileage, and emissions changes. The results of the FEC framework showed that no increase in NOx emissions, above 2007 levels, could be achieved at a cost of a small increase in CO2 in 2016 (+1.8%). This could be achieved by taxation policy primarily resulting in a shift away from small engine diesel vehicles (<1.4 L) in the fleet which were responsible for the largest contribution to emissions. In the transition of vehicle fleets to full electrification or full decarbonisation, the FEC framework developed here offers the potential to formulate practical and optimised adjustments in static taxation systems. These adjustments will assist in achieving the requirements of national policies on reducing emission.

Clean air for some: Unintended spillover effects of regional air pollution policies.

China has enacted a number of ambitious pollution control policies to mitigate air pollution in urban areas. Unintended side effects of these policies to other environmental policy arenas and regions have largely been ignored. To bridge this gap, we use a multiregional input-output model in combination with an atmospheric chemical transport model to simulate clean air policy scenarios and evaluate their environmental impacts on primary PM2.5 and secondary precursor emissions, as well as CO2 emissions and water consumption, in the target region and spillover effects to other regions. Our results show that the reduction in primary PM2.5 and secondary precursor emissions in the target regions comes at the cost of increasing emissions especially in neighboring provinces. Similarly, co-benefits of lower CO2 emissions and reduced water consumption in the target region are achieved at the expense of higher impacts elsewhere, through outsourcing production to less developed regions in China.

Initial Declines in China’s Provincial Energy Consumption and Their Drivers

Jiamin Ou is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is the winner of the 2018 YSSP Mihalevich Award, given by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Her research focus is energy and ozone pollution in China from a consumption-based perspective. Heran Zheng is a PhD student at University of East Anglia, UK. He specializes in environmental economics and input-output analysis. His work focuses on city-level input-output model development and low-carbon transitions at urbanization. Dr. Jing Meng is a lecturer at the University College London, UK. Her research focus is climate change and air pollution policies, including theories and modeling of environmental economics, energy innovation and sustainable consumption, and trade policies. She earned a PhD in Environmental Geography at Peking University (2016), and then she worked at the University of East Anglia and University of Cambridge as a research associate. She currently is also a research fellow of Cambridge Center for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, University of Cambridge. Dr. Yuli Shan is a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia and an afflicated researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He was awarded as a “Green Talent” by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in 2018. His work focuses on emission accounting, climate change economics, and sustainable development. He has published over 40 papers and has been covered by several media outlets, including Reuters, Financial Times, Xinhua News Agency, People’s Network, etc. In June 2019, Yuli will join the University of Groningen as a Research Fellow. Dr. Zhifu Mi is a lecturer at the University College London and serving as an Associate Editor for Journal of Cleaner Production. He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Science Advances, Nature Geoscience, and Nature Communications. He was selected to join the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe in recognition of his innovative research in the economics of climate change. He was awarded the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2017 Best Early Career Article in Environmental Research Letters, and the 2016 Highly Cited Original Paper in Applied Energy. Dabo Guan is a Chair in Climate Change Economics at the University of East Anglia, a Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University, China, and a Fellow of Academy of Social Sciences, UK. He specializes in climate change economics for international climate change mitigation and adaptation and their applications in developing countries. He was a Lead Author for the IPCC AR5. He was the Highly Cited Researcher for 2018. He received the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize 2014, the Leontief Prize 3 times, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize. His paper about climate change impact on beer consumption received the 2018 Altimetric Top 100 award.

Understanding Public Response to Air Quality Using Tweet Analysis

Poor air quality is recognized as a major risk factor for human health globally. Critical to addressing this important public-health issue is the effective dissemination of air quality data, information about adverse health effects, and the necessary mitigation measures. However, recent studies have shown that even when public get data on air quality and understand its importance, people do not necessarily take actions to protect their health or exhibit pro-environmental behaviors to address the problem. Most existing studies on public attitude and response to air quality are based on offline studies, with a limited number of survey participants and over a limited number of geographical locations. For a larger survey size and a wider set of locations, we collected Twitter data for a period of nearly 2 years and analyzed these data for three major cities: Paris, London, and New Delhi. We identify the three hashtags in each city that best correlate the frequency of tweets with local air quality. Using tweets with these hashtags, we determined that people’s response to air quality across all three cities was nearly identical when considering relative changes in air pollution. Using machine-learning algorithms, we determined that health concerns dominated public response when air quality degraded, with the strongest increase in concern being in New Delhi, where pollution levels are the highest among the three cities studied. The public call for political solutions when air quality worsens is consistent with similar findings with offline surveys in other cities. We also conducted an unsupervised learning analysis to extract topics from tweets in Delhi and studied their evolution over time and with changing air quality. Our analysis helped extract relevant words or features associated with different air quality–related topics such as air pollution policy and health. Also, the topic modeling analysis revealed niche topics associated with sporadic air quality events, such as fireworks during festivals and the air quality impact on an outdoor sport event. Our approach shows that a tweet-based analysis can enable social scientists to probe and survey public response to events such as air quality in a timely fashion and help policy makers respond appropriately.

Don't abandon evidence and process on air pollution policy.

Who decides how to establish causality?

Nonlinear impacts of future anthropogenic aerosol emissions on Arctic warming

Past reductions of anthropogenic aerosol concentrations in Europe and North America could have amplified Arctic warming. In the future the impact of air pollution policies may differ, because the major anthropogenic sources of atmospheric aerosols are increasingly located in Asia. In this study numerical experiments evaluating only direct aerosol effects on atmospheric temperatures indicate that, while reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions weaken Arctic warming, direct radiative forcing effects by reductions of anthropogenic aerosol concentrations, additional to those obtained by lower CO2 emissions, can either amplify or diminish it. Interactions between regionally modified radiation in Asia and internal climate variability may differently initiate and sustain atmospheric planetary waves propagating into the Arctic. In a nonlinear manner planetary waves may redistribute atmospheric and oceanic meridional heat fluxes at the high latitudes and either amplify or diminish Arctic warming in 2050. Lower CO2 concentrations might apparently contribute to reduce the interactions between the Arctic system and the lower latitudes, thus reducing the influence of strong air quality measures in Asia on the Arctic amplification of global warming. While past and present air pollution policies could have amplified Arctic warming, in the future the effects from atmospheric pollution reductions are less certain, depending on the future CO2 concentrations, and requiring improved simulations of changing aerosol concentrations and their interactions with clouds in Asia and the Arctic.