Health and economic benefits of clean air policies in China: A case study for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region

Optimizing air quality and health Co-benefits of mitigation technologies in China: An integrated assessment

Carbon mitigation technologies lead to air quality improvement and health co-benefits, while the practical effects of the technologies are dependent on the energy composition, technological advancements, and economic development. In China, mitigation technologies such as end-of-pipe treatment, renewable energy adoption, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and sector electrification demonstrate significant promise in meeting carbon reduction targets. However, the optimization of these technologies for maximum co-benefits remains unclear. Here, we employ an integrated assessment model (AIM/enduse, CAM-chem, IMED|HEL) to analyze air quality shifts and their corresponding health and economic impacts at the provincial level in China within the two-degree target. Our findings reveal that a combination of end-of-pipe technology, renewable energy utilization, and electrification yields the most promising results in air quality improvement, with a reduction of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by -34.6 μg m-3 and ozone by -18.3 ppb in 2050 compared to the reference scenario. In contrast, CCS technology demonstrates comparatively modest improvements in air quality (-9.4 μg m-3 for PM2.5 and -2.4 ppb for ozone) and cumulative premature deaths reduction (-3.4 million from 2010 to 2050) compared to the end-of-pipe scenario. Notably, densely populated regions such as Henan, Hebei, Shandong, and Sichuan experience the most health and economic benefits. This study aims to project effective future mitigation technologies and climate policies on air quality improvement and carbon mitigation. Furthermore, it seeks to delineate detailed provincial-level air pollution control strategies, offering valuable guidance for policymakers and stakeholders in pursuing sustainable and health-conscious environmental management.

Uncovering the differentiated impacts of carbon neutrality and clean air policies in multi-provinces of China

Ambitious action plans have been launched to address climate change and air pollution. Through coupling the IMED|CGE, GAINS, and IMED|HEL models, this study investigate the impacts of implementing carbon neutrality and clean air policies on the energy-environment-health-economy chain in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei-Henan-Shandong-Shanxi region of China. Results show that Shandong holds the largest reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions toward the 1.5°C target. Shandong, Henan, and Hebei are of particularly prominent pollutant reduction potential. Synergistic effects of carbon reduction on decreasing PM2.5 concentration will increase in the future, specifically in energy-intensive regions. Co-deployment of carbon reduction and end-of-pipe technologies are beneficial to decrease PM2.5-related mortalities and economic loss by 4.7-12.9% in 2050. Provincial carbon reduction cost will be higher than monetary health benefits after 2030, indicating that more zero-carbon technologies should be developed. Our findings provide scientific enlightenment on policymaking toward achieving carbon reduction and pollution mitigation from multiple perspectives.

Long-term variations of air pollutants and public exposure in China during 2000-2020

Since 2000, China has faced severe air pollution challenges，prompting the initiation of comprehensive emission control measures post-2013. The subsequent implementation of these measures has led to remarkable enhancements in air quality. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the long-term trends in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and gaseous pollutants of ozone (O3) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) across China from 2000 to 2020. Utilizing the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model, we conducted a nationwide analysis of air quality, systematically quantifying model predictions against observations for pollutants. The CMAQ model effectively captured the trends of air pollutants, meeting recommended performance benchmarks. The findings reveal variations in pollutant concentrations, with initial increases in PM2.5 followed by a decline after 2013. The proportion of the population living in high PM2.5 concentrations (>75 μg/m3) decreased to <5 % after 2015. However, during the period from 2017 to 2020, around 40 % of the population continued to live in regions that did not meet the criteria for Chinese air quality standards (35 μg/m3). From 2000 to 2019, fewer than 20 % of the population met the WHO standard (100 μg/m3) for MDA8 O3. In 2000, 77 % of the population met the NO2 standard (<20 μg/m3), a figure that declined to 60 % between 2005 and 2014, nearly reaching 70 % in 2020. This study offers a comprehensive analysis of the changes in pollutants and public exposure in 2000-2020. It serves as a foundational resource for future efforts in air pollution control and health research.

Specific analysis of PM2.5-attributed disease burden in typical areas of Northwest China

Background

Frequent air pollution events in Northwest China pose a serious threat to human health. However, there is a lack of specific differences assessment in PM2.5-related disease burden. Therefore, we aimed to estimate the PM2.5-related premature deaths and health economic losses in this typical northwest region, taking into account disease-specific, age-specific, and region-specific factors.

Methods

We utilized the WRF-Chem model to simulate and analyze the characteristics and exposure levels of PM2.5 pollution in Gansu Province, a typical region of Northwest China. Subsequently, we estimated the premature mortality and health economic losses associated with PM2.5 by combining the Global Exposure Mortality Model (GEMM) and the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL).

Results

The results suggested that the PM2.5 concentrations in Gansu Province in 2019 varied spatially, with a decrease from north to south. The number of non-accidental deaths attributable to PM2.5 pollution was estimated to be 14,224 (95% CI: 11,716-16,689), accounting for 8.6% of the total number of deaths. The PM2.5-related health economic loss amounted to 28.66 (95% CI: 23.61-33.63) billion yuan, equivalent to 3.3% of the regional gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019. Ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke were the leading causes of PM2.5-attributed deaths, contributing to 50.6% of the total. Older adult individuals aged 60 and above accounted for over 80% of all age-related disease deaths. Lanzhou had a higher number of attributable deaths and health economic losses compared to other regions. Although the number of PM2.5-attributed deaths was lower in the Hexi Corridor region, the per capita health economic loss was higher.

Conclusion

Gansu Province exhibits distinct regional characteristics in terms of PM2.5 pollution as well as disease- and age-specific health burdens. This highlights the significance of implementing tailored measures that are specific to local conditions to mitigate the health risks and economic ramifications associated with PM2.5 pollution.

A dynamic game modeling on air pollution mitigation with regional cooperation and noncooperation

Mitigating regional air pollution involves multifaceted trade-offs, including long-term versus short-term development versus emission-reduction among different regions. Considering the heterogeneity of levels of regional economic development and capacity for environmental governance as well as the spatial spillover effect of pollution, the game theory method can explore each region's dynamic emission-reduction path. In this article, the dynamic game mechanism (Regional Environment Economy Game Modeling model) is incorporated into the environment economy system to solve the Nash equilibrium under dynamic conditions and explore the game strategies of each region. Taking air pollution mitigation in North China as an example, this article compares the emission-reduction effect and social welfare under regional cooperative and noncooperative game scenarios and clarifies the abatement-sharing mechanism between provinces. The results show that a noncooperative policy is strictly inferior to a cooperative policy for achieving given emission-reduction goals and maximizing social welfare. Our findings offer evidence for strengthening regional cooperation in reducing carbon emissions and provide policy recommendations for synergistic pollution abatement and joint regional pollution mitigation. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:1555-1569. © 2023 SETAC.

Large-scale renewable energy brings regionally disproportional air quality and health co-benefits in China

Developing renewable energy could jointly reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and bring air pollution-related health co-benefits. However, the temporal and sub-national distributions of investment costs and human health co-benefits from renewable energy deployment remain unclear. To investigate this gap, we linked multiple models for a more comprehensive assessment of the economic-environmental-health co-benefits of renewable energy development in China. The results show that developing renewable energy can avoid 0.6 million premature mortalities, 151 million morbidities, and 111 million work-loss days in 2050. Meanwhile, the human health and economic co-benefits vary substantially across regions in China. Renewable energy can undoubtedly bring health and economic co-benefits. Nevertheless, the economic benefits lag considerably behind the high initial investment cost, first negative in 2030 (-0.6 trillion Yuan) and then positive in 2050 (2.9 trillion Yuan). Hence, renewable energy deployment strategy must be carefully designed considering the regional disparities.

How does vehicle emission control policy affect air pollution emissions? Evidence from Hainan Province, China

Vehicular emissions have become important sources of air pollution in China. Regarding the environmental impacts of vehicle emission control policies (VECPs), changes in air pollutants and CO₂ emissions have attracted more attention. Hainan is the first province in China declared to ban the sale of fuel-powered cars by 2030, aiming to accelerate cutting down the local air pollution emissions. However, there is no previous study examining how these VECPs would affect air pollutants in Hainan. Further, research on whether the controls would lead to a real carbon reduction is limited. Therefore, this paper quantitatively assesses the emission changes of primary air pollutants (including NO_x, CO, VOCs, PM_2.5, PM₁₀, and PM_TSP) and greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O) in the transportation sector with regard to different VECPs in Hainan. The results reveal that (1) VECPs would lead to significant increases in vehicular population by 21 %-65 % in 2025-2050. Specifically, light-duty cars and buses with 4-stroke engines (LD4Cs) is the largest contributor and banning sales of fuel-powered vehicles would lead to a larger increase of 1914.6 thousand (64 %) in 2030; (2) for air pollutant emissions, the policy scenario would bring notable reduction effects, decreasing by 1.0 %-16.0 % and 16.7 %-38.7 % in 2030 and 2050 (PM excluding), respectively, suggesting VECPs play important roles in alleviating environmental pollution; (3) conversely, for CO₂ emissions, the policy scenario would cause increases of 0.8 Mt. (17.8 %) and 0.3 Mt. (6.1 %) in 2035 and 2050, respectively, indicating promoting new energy vehicles (NEVs) would increase carbon emissions. Meanwhile, it suggests that CO₂ emission in the transportation sector of Hainan peaked in 2020. This research highlights that VECPs would be a double-edged sword, leading to air pollutants reductions but not necessarily decline CO₂ emissions. This fact would further accelerate mechanism and technological innovation in transport to alleviate air pollution and carbon emissions simultaneously.

Quantifying the Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity of PM2.5 Pollution and Its Determinants in 273 Cities in China

Fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) pollution brings great negative impacts to human health and social development. From the perspective of heterogeneity and the combination of national and urban analysis, this study aims to investigate the variation patterns of PM_2.5 pollution and its determinants, using geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) in 273 Chinese cities from 2015 to 2019. A comprehensive analytical framework was established, composed of 14 determinants from multi-dimensions, including population, economic development, technology, and natural conditions. The results indicated that: (1) PM_2.5 pollution was most severe in winter and the least severe in summer, while the monthly, daily, and hourly variations showed "U"-shaped, pulse-shaped and "W"-shaped patterns; (2) Coastal cities in southeast China have better air quality than other cities, and the interaction between determinants enhanced the spatial disequilibrium of PM_2.5 pollution; (3) The determinants showed significant heterogeneity on PM_2.5 pollution-specifically, population density, trade openness, the secondary industry, and invention patents exhibited the strongest positive impacts on PM_2.5 pollution in the North China Plain. Relative humidity, precipitation and per capita GDP were more effective in improving atmospheric quality in cities with serious PM_2.5 pollution. Altitude and the proportion of built-up areas showed strong effects in western China. These findings will be conductive to formulating targeted and differentiated prevention strategies for regional air pollution control.

Developing China's roadmap for air quality improvement: A review on technology development and future prospects

Air pollution control policies in China have been experiencing profound changes, highlighting a strategic transformation from total pollutant emission control to air quality improvement, along with the shifting targets starting from acid rain and NO_x emissions to PM_2.5 pollution, and then the emerging O₃ challenges. The marvelous achievements have been made with the dramatic decrease of SO₂ emission and fundamental improvement of PM_2.5 concentration. Despite these achievements, China has proposed Beautiful China target through 2035 and the goal of 2030 carbon peak and 2060 carbon neutrality, which impose stricter requirements on air quality and synergistic mitigation with Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Against this background, an integrated multi-objective and multi-benefit roadmap is required to provide decision support for China's long-term air quality improvement strategy. This paper systematically reviews the technical system for developing the air quality improvement roadmap, which was integrated from the research output of China's National Key R&D Program for Research on Atmospheric Pollution Factors and Control Technologies (hereafter Special NKP), covering mid- and long-term air quality target setting techniques, quantitative analysis techniques for emission reduction targets corresponding to air quality targets, and pathway optimization techniques for realizing reduction targets. The experience and lessons derived from the reviews have implications for the reformation of China's air quality improvement roadmap in facing challenges of synergistic mitigation of PM_2.5 and O₃, and the coupling with climate change mitigation.

The efforts of China to combat air pollution during the period of 2015-2018: A case study assessing the environmental, health and economic benefits in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and surrounding "2 + 26" regions

During the period of 2015-2018, Chinese government had made great efforts to mitigate air pollutants, such as air quality monitoring, energy structure adjustment, and pollutant emission reduction from industry, transportation and household sectors. With the special investment of 152 billion Chinese Yuan (CNY) in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) and surrounding "2 + 26" regions, the annual local concentrations of PM_2.5, PM₁₀, SO₂ and NO₂ decreased from 77, 132, 38 and 46 μg/m³ to 60, 109, 20 and 43 μg/m³. It was estimated that the improvement in air quality avoided 27,021 (95 % CIs 12,548-39,738) premature deaths attributed to air pollution exposure based on an exposure-response function, including 45 %, 17 % and 15 % of cardiopulmonary, lung cancer and respiratory morality cases. Air pollution reduction was also effective in reducing work time loss, which reduced the total working time loss by 3.8 × 10⁷ (95 % CIs 1.8 × 10⁷-5.6 × 10⁷) h, and the per capita working time loss by 0.28 (95 % CIs 0.13-0.41) h/capita by 2018. From the economic aspect, air pollution control actions in those regions saved 95.6 (95 % CIs 44.2-141) billion CNY economic loss by using the value of statistical life (VSL). The total benefit-cost ratio was 63.7 % (95 % CIs 29.4 %-93.7 %). The cost-effectiveness in Beijing and Tianjin were relatively low due to the regional contribution from other cities of the air pollution transmission channel. Despite the uncertainties, the results clearly show the significance of the environmental, health and economic benefits of actions in the BTH and surrounding "2 + 26" regions for combating air pollution.

Study on the spatiotemporal dynamic of ground-level ozone concentrations on multiple scales across China during the blue sky protection campaign

Surface ozone (O₃), one of the harmful air pollutants, generated significantly negative effects on human health and plants. Existing O₃ datasets with coarse spatiotemporal resolution and limited coverage, and the uncertainties of O₃ influential factors seriously restrain related epidemiology and air pollution studies. To tackle above issues, we proposed a novel scheme to estimate daily O₃ concentrations on a fine grid scale (1 km × 1 km) from 2018 to 2020 across China based on machine learning methods using hourly observed ground-level pollutant concentrations data, meteorological data, satellite data, and auxiliary data including digital elevation model (DEM), land use data (LUD), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), population (POP), and nighttime light images (NTL), and to identify the difference of influential factors of O₃ on diverse urbanization and topography conditions. Some findings were achieved. The correlation coefficients (R²) between O₃ concentrations and surface net solar radiation (SNSR), boundary layer height (BLH), 2 m temperature (T2M), 10 m v-component (MVW), and NDVI were 0.80, 0.40, 0.35, 0.30, and 0.20, respectively. The random forest (RF) demonstrated the highest validation R² (0.86) and lowest validation RMSE (13.74 μg/m³) in estimating O₃ concentrations, followed by support vector machine (SVM) (R² = 0.75, RMSE = 18.39 μg/m³), backpropagation neural network (BP) (R² = 0.74, RMSE = 19.26 μg/m³), and multiple linear regression (MLR) (R² = 0.52, RMSE = 25.99 μg/m³). Our China High-Resolution O₃ Dataset (CHROD) exhibited an acceptable accuracy at different spatial-temporal scales. Additionally, O₃ concentrations showed decreasing trend and represented obviously spatiotemporal heterogeneity across China from 2018 to 2020. Overall, O₃ was mainly affected by human activities in higher urbanization regions, while O₃ was mainly controlled by meteorological factors, vegetation coverage, and elevation in lower urbanization regions. The scheme of this study is useful and valuable in understanding the mechanism of O₃ formation and improving the quality of the O₃ dataset.

Air pollution and innovation performance of Chinese cities: human capital and labour cost perspective

Environmental protection and innovation performance are key issues that affect the sustainable development and value growth of cities. Using data of 272 prefecture-level cities during 2002-2016 and 2,169 listed companies, and the air ventilation coefficient and government environmental regulations, as the instrumental variables for PM_2.5 concentrations, this paper applies two-stage OLS (2SLS) to investigate how air pollution affects China's technological innovation and its realization mechanism. The results indicate that the rise in air pollution significantly inhibits the technological innovation level of regions as a whole as well as individual enterprises. When considering the spatial effect of the spread of PM_2.5 concentrations, due to positive spillover effects on innovation activities, the spread of air pollution has negative impacts on technological innovation activities in surrounding cities. Human capital and labour costs are important channels through which air pollution influences China's technological innovation. The implementation of pilot carbon trading policies can effectively reduce air pollution and then contribute to the achievement of the goals of the green growth strategy.

Spatiotemporal variations of PM2.5 pollution and its dynamic relationships with meteorological conditions in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region

Identifying the effects of meteorological conditions on PM_2.5 pollution is of great significance to explore methods to reduce atmospheric pollution. This study attempts to analyze the spatiotemporal variations of PM_2.5 pollution and its dynamic nexus with meteorological factors in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region from 2015 to 2020 using standard deviation ellipse (SDE) and panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model. The results indicate that: (1) In 2015-2020, PM_2.5 pollution decreased significantly, indicating air pollution control policies in China have taken effect; Also, it showed a cumulative effect, or there was the path dependence of air pollution. (2) PM_2.5 pollution presented a distribution pattern from northeast to southwest, while the directionality of air pollution has weakened. Based on SDE, PM_2.5 pollution in Cangzhou can reflect the average level in the BTH; (3) Meteorological conditions exhibited a lagged and sustained effect on PM_2.5 pollution. Specifically, the effects of meteorological factors on PM_2.5 presented disequilibrium over time. In the long run, precipitation and temperature mainly showed negative impacts on PM_2.5 pollution, while wind speed, relative humidity and sunshine duration aggravated PM_2.5 pollution in the BTH. This study contributes to extending the study on the spatiotemporal evolution of PM_2.5 pollution and its links with meteorological conditions.

Shock effect of COVID-19 infection on environmental quality and economic development in China: causal linkages (Health Economic Evaluation)

Since coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was first reported on December 2019 in Wuhan, it fast spread to the rest of China, which has turned into a global public health problem later and generated global stock markets to violently shake. We inspect the causal relationships between economic development (ED) and environmental quality (EQ) during the period from January 2019 to May 2020 with the structural break for China and investigate the causal linkages between ED and EQ in subgroup of before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 with a semi-parametric model. The empirical tests show that smoothing structural transforms matter for the linkages of causality between ED and EQ, especially after COVID-19 infection. While the Toda-Yamamoto causality analysis supports unidirectional causality between ED and EQ before the outbreak of COVID-19, under structural shifts by the causality supplies of bidirectional casual linkages after the outbreak of COVID-19. Our results further clarified the proof that the economic activity gives rise to the environmental pollution and energy utilization mainly via the shock of COVID-19 in China. The emphasis on nonlinear causality between economic development and environmental quality may be an opportunity for China's economic recovery under considering the factor of COVID-19 infection.