Effect of restricted emissions during COVID-19 on air quality in India

By Shubham Sharma, Mengyuan Zhang, Anshika, Jingsi Gao, Hongliang Zhang, S. Kota. Science of the Total Environment, 2020

1,057 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The effectiveness and cost are always top factors for policy-makers to decide control measures and most measures had no pre-test before implementation. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, human activities are largely restricted in many regions in India since mid-March of 2020, and it is a progressing experiment to testify effectiveness of restricted emissions. In this study, concentrations of six criteria pollutants, PM10, PM2.5, CO, NO2, ozone and SO2 during March 16th to April 14th from 2017 to 2020 in 22 cities covering different regions of India were analysed. Overall, around 43, 31, 10, and 18% decreases in PM2.5, PM10, CO, and NO2 in India were observed during lockdown period compared to previous years. While, there were 17% increase in O3 and negligible changes in SO2. The air quality index (AQI) reduced by 44, 33, 29, 15 and 32% in north, south, east, central and western India, respectively. Correlation between cities especially in northern and eastern regions improved in 2020 compared to previous years, indicating more significant regional transport than previous years. The mean excessive risks of PM reduced by ~52% nationwide due to restricted activities in lockdown period. To eliminate the effects of possible favourable meteorology, the WRF-AERMOD model system was also applied in Delhi-NCR with actual meteorology during the lockdown period and an un-favourable event in early November of 2019 and results show that predicted PM2.5 could increase by only 33% in unfavourable meteorology. This study gives confidence to the regulatory bodies that even during unfavourable meteorology, a significant improvement in air quality could be expected if strict execution of air quality control plans is implemented.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f03d8f4d699024097a222af6e5825091a4d7148e

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Citations in the corpus

Impact of COVID-19 large scale restriction on environment and economy in Indonesia (2020, background): “5 had maximum reduction in most regions (Sharma et al., 2020).”
Social and Travel Lockdown Impact Considering Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) on Air Quality in Megacities of India: Present Benefits, Future Challenges and Way Forward (2020, background): “In contrast to the WS in northern India during the March and April months of 2020, it was lower in the southern India, i.e., ~1.0 m s–1 and eastern India, i.e., 0.7 m s–1 as reported by Sharma et al. (2020).”
Effect of lockdown amid COVID-19 pandemic on air quality of the megacity Delhi, India (2020, neutral): “Moreover there is a partial restriction on power plants operating within the NCT Delhi region in particular and northern India in general (Sharma et al., 2020) in order to procure coal powered energy, an essential commodity during the lockdown period.”
The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban planning, design, and management (2020, positive): “5 levels decreased during the recent lockdown, under unfavorable meteorological conditions, they could indeed increase (Sharma et al., 2020).”
The impact of COVID-19 on transport volume and freight capacity dynamics: An empirical analysis in German food retail logistics (2020, positive): “Research object on different levels of investigation are, but are not limited to, environmental developments (Saadat et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020), agriculture (Siche, 2020), travel behavior (de Vos, 2020), global supply chains (Ivanov, 2020), society and global environment (Chakraborty and Mai”