Effect of Urbanization on Ozone and Resultant Health Effects in the Pearl River Delta Region of China

Abstract

The United Nations has reported that 55% of the global population resides in urban areas, and 68% of the population is expected to be urban dwellers by 2050. Urbanization has critical implications for global land cover. Relevant literature has provided evidence attributing climatic effects to urban expansion; however, few studies have investigated the effect on public health and pollutant sensitivity to emissions. This study aimed to characterize the effect of urbanization‐induced changes in regional climate on ozone (O3), to evaluate ozone sensitivity to nitrogen oxide (NOx) and volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions, and to estimate premature mortalities due to O3 exposure. We employed atmospheric models with the higher‐order decoupled direct method to simulate effects of urbanization on O3 and to determine O3 sensitivity to NOx and VOC emissions. China‐specific concentration response functions were utilized to estimate cardiovascular and respiratory mortalities due to ozone exposure. Urbanization increased O3, which translated to a 39.6% increase in O3‐induced premature mortality (1,100 deaths). Moreover, O3 has become less/more sensitive to unit changes in NOx and VOC emissions in various cities. Urban greening may reduce urban temperature, but it may increase O3 in some cities due to the additional VOC emissions of greening. These findings highlight the strong interactions between land use policies, urban climate adaptation strategies, and air quality policies, suggesting the need of cobeneficial strategies and policies. We proposed a precision environmental management concept that emphasizes the importance of considering the specific atmospheric condition and composition of a city when formulating its environmental policies.

A New Evaluation of the Role of Urbanization to Warming at Various Spatial Scales: Evidence From the Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macau Region, China

“…Consequently, it has brought certain obstacles to quantitatively assess the urbanization impacts on people's daily life and health issues (Y. J. Yang et al, 2020;Yim et al, 2019). This paper will adopt different methods to systematically evaluate and compare the contribution of climate warming caused by urbanization at different spatial scales in this area (Metropolises, the GBA, and the whole GHMR area) and estimate the level of uncertainty based on different data.…”

“…Since there are no sufficient rural stations that can be used as a climate reference in this region, especially in the recent past, it is difficult in studying the contribution of urbanization to the warming and its uncertainty. Consequently, it has brought certain obstacles to quantitatively assess the urbanization impacts on people's daily life and health issues (Y. J. Yang et al, 2020; Yim et al, 2019).…”

Spatiotemporal Assessment of Health Burden and Economic Losses attributable to short-term exposure to Ozone During 2015 - 2018 in China

“…"All-cause mortality", "cardiovascular disease mortality", "respiratory disease mortality" were selected as the health outcomes of our study due to the high correlation between these endpoints and Ozone exposure in previous studies [45][46][47][48].…”

Development and intercity transferability of land-use regression models for predicting ambient PM<sub>10</sub>, PM<sub>2.5</sub>, NO<sub>2</sub> and O<sub>3</sub> concentrations in northern Taiwan

“…Our study established a reasonable LUR model for ambient O3 in the TKMA with an R 2 value of 0.80 and an LOOCV R 2 value of 0.70, which is a relatively high predictive performance. Compared with PM10, PM2.5, and NO2, the establishment of O3 LUR models has been limited in these previous Taiwan LUR studies (Table S2) or in most of the LUR studies in other areas, but it is essential to establish O3 LUR models given that O3 is a toxic photochemical pollutant threatening human health and the ecosystem (Ning et al, 2020;Yim et al, 2019).…”