COVID-19 lockdowns cause global air pollution declines
By Zander S. Venter, K. Aunan, S. Chowdhury, Jos Lelieveld. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020
905 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented reductions in economic activity. We find that, after accounting for meteorological variations, lockdown events have reduced the population-weighted concentration of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter levels by about 60% and 31% in 34 countries, with mixed effects on ozone. Reductions in transportation sector emissions are largely responsible for the NO2 anomalies. The lockdown response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused an unprecedented reduction in global economic and transport activity. We test the hypothesis that this has reduced tropospheric and ground-level air pollution concentrations, using satellite data and a network of >10,000 air quality stations. After accounting for the effects of meteorological variability, we find declines in the population-weighted concentration of ground-level nitrogen dioxide (NO2: 60% with 95% CI 48 to 72%), and fine particulate matter (PM2.5: 31%; 95% CI: 17 to 45%), with marginal increases in ozone (O3: 4%; 95% CI: −2 to 10%) in 34 countries during lockdown dates up until 15 May. Except for ozone, satellite measurements of the troposphere indicate much smaller reductions, highlighting the spatial variability of pollutant anomalies attributable to complex NOx chemistry and long-distance transport of fine particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5). By leveraging Google and Apple mobility data, we find empirical evidence for a link between global vehicle transportation declines and the reduction of ambient NO2 exposure. While the state of global lockdown is not sustainable, these findings allude to the potential for mitigating public health risk by reducing “business as usual” air pollutant emissions from economic activities. Explore trends here: https://nina.earthengine.app/view/lockdown-pollution.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96e6005ae6bcfca295c189d5979610b8df65becc
How researchers see this paper
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- Zander S. Venter
- Mohit Somani
- A. Srivastava
- David N. Barton
- S. K. Gummadivalli
- V. Gundersen
- Aparna Sharma
- Helene Figari
Citations in the corpus
- Indirect implications of COVID-19 towards sustainable environment: An investigation in Indian context (2020, background): “5 emissions in India were reduced by ~5300 after two weeks of announcement of lockdown (Venter et al., 2020).”
- Urban nature in a time of crisis: recreational use of green space increases during the COVID-19 outbreak in Oslo, Norway (2020, background): “Important questions of green justice relate to the social distribution of access to green space, both in and between neighborhoods, as well as the interaction between different social groups in urban green spaces (Venter et al 2020c).”