Air Pollution in China: Mapping of Concentrations and Sources
By R. Rohde, R. Muller. PLoS ONE, 2015
708 citations recorded by the source corpus.
China has recently made available hourly air pollution data from over 1500 sites, including airborne particulate matter (PM), SO2, NO2, and O3. We apply Kriging interpolation to four months of data to derive pollution maps for eastern China. Consistent with prior findings, the greatest pollution occurs in the east, but significant levels are widespread across northern and central China and are not limited to major cities or geologic basins. Sources of pollution are widespread, but are particularly intense in a northeast corridor that extends from near Shanghai to north of Beijing. During our analysis period, 92% of the population of China experienced >120 hours of unhealthy air (US EPA standard), and 38% experienced average concentrations that were unhealthy. China’s population-weighted average exposure to PM2.5 was 52 μg/m3. The observed air pollution is calculated to contribute to 1.6 million deaths/year in China [0.7–2.2 million deaths/year at 95% confidence], roughly 17% of all deaths in China.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Transportation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9554eba63a94e58fa3e01abfe9bd230b21a558a9
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Citations in the corpus
- Assessing the impact of clean air action on air quality trends in Beijing using a machine learning technique (2019, neutral): “Accordingly, air pollution has been receiving much attention from both the public and policymakers in China, especially in Beijing – the capital of China with around 22 million inhabitants – which has suffered extremely high levels of air pollutants (Rohde and Muller, 2015; Guo et al., 2013; Zhu et ”
- A machine learning method to estimate PM2.5 concentrations across China with remote sensing, meteorological and land use information. (2018, background): “Currently, more than 90% of the Chinese population are experiencing unhealthy air according to US EPA standard (Rohde and Muller, 2015).”
- China's changing economy: implications for its carbon dioxide emissions (2016, background): “5) in China has been estimated to contribute to 1.6 million premature deaths per year, i.e. 4,000 deaths per day (Rohde & Muller, 2015) – or a monetary equivalent (using conventional monetization techniques) of more than 10% of China’s GDP (Hamilton, in press).”
- The dynamic relationship between environmental pollution, economic development and public health: Evidence from China (2017, background): “In a recent study, Rohde and Muller (2015) estimated that approximately 1.6 M people died in China annually due to PM2.”