Study shows less air pollution in China after coronavirus shutdown
When life has adapted to a closer-to-normal reality after coronavirus, lessons learned about air pollution have the potential to change the way we operate in our daily lives, suggests a Stanford University study.
Marshall Burke, an earth systems professor, reported that the reduction in air pollution resulting from the economic shutdown likely saved some 77,000 lives in China, where industrial coal burning is known as the major cause of air pollution and premature death.
He used data from U.S. government sensors in four Chinese cities to measure levels of PM2.5—the atmospheric particulate matter most associated with the greatest health risk in air pollution—and averaged the drop in pollution levels.
In southern cities such as Shanghai and Wuhan, where wintertime pollution is mainly from cars and smaller industry fueled by coal, pollution declines appeared to be dramatic, Burke found. NASA also published striking satellite images of the reduction in air pollution, specifically nitrogen oxide over northern China, seen during the country’s economic slowdown.
Two months of pollution reduction “likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China,” Burke wrote in a blog post on G-Feed, using statistics current at that time in March.
Burke pointed out that the effects he calculated are health benefits of the air pollution changes and do not account for the many other short- or long-term negative consequences of social and economic disruption on health or other outcomes, which could exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution.
“The calculation is perhaps a useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo, i.e., the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods,” he wrote.
The results in China support findings from a recent International Gas Union report titled 2019 Case Studies in Urban Air Quality. Examining three cities—Morbi, India; London; and Bogota, Colombia—the report showed that levels of PM2.5 dropped sharply when residential coal use was replaced with natural gas and bus fleets were converted to run on compressed natural gas.