Estimated Contributions of Emissions Controls, Meteorological Factors, Population Growth, and Changes in Baseline Mortality to Reductions in Ambient PM2.5 and PM2.5-Related Mortality in China, 2013–2017

The Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan (referred to as the Action Plan henceforth) provides a golden opportunity for China to evaluate whether the remarkable air quality improvements as a result of the plan have brought about health benefits to residents. Based on the ground-level particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 μm (PM 2.5 ) concentrations and the daily respiratory-cardiovascular mortality, we aimed to assess changes in the mortality effect associated with short-term exposure to PM 2.5 due to the implementation of the Action Plan in Beijing. We analyzed the changes in PM 2.5 concentrations and air quality during the pre-and post-emission reduction periods. We then used the generalized additive model to estimate the changes in mortality risk associated with PM 2.5 exposure during both periods. We found that following the introduction of the Action Plan, the annual average PM 2.5 concentrations declined from 101.7 μg m −3 in 2013 to 58.6 μg m −3 in 2017, attaining the target of the plan (60 μg m −3 ). The remarkable reduction in PM 2.5 concentrations has led to a marked decrease in mortality risk. Compared with the pre-emission reduction level, total respiratory mortality decreased from 0.56% (95% CI: 0.40%-0.73%) to 0.43% (95% CI: 0.23%-0.63%), while the total cardiovascular mortality decreased from 0.44% (95% CI: 0.37%-0.52%) to 0.29% (95% CI: 0.19%-0.39%). Significant decreases were also observed in sex-specific subgroups. Our study implied that the significant efforts of the nation to clean China's air has yielded positive results of air quality improvement and human health protection in Beijing. However, the ambient air pollution in Beijing remains severe. The PM 2.5 concentrations still exceed the level (annual average of 10 μg m −3 ) recommended by the World Health Organization. Thus, consistent efforts are required to implement the emission abatement measures to continuously curb air pollution and protect public health.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of the short-term mortality effect of the national action plan on air pollution in Beijing, China

Han

Sun

Gong

et al. 2020

“…Spatially resolved population count from the 2017 LandScan High Resolution global Population Data (Rose et al 2018) at~1 km resolution is regridded to the WRF-Chem grid to match the pollutant field. Population is evolved during 2015-2018 by rescaling Landscan data with the population structure from the Chinese statistical yearbook, as done in Ding et al (2019). China-and age-specific baseline mortality data for 2015, 2016 and 2017 are retrieved from the 2017 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study (Dicker et al 2018).…”

Section: Population Exposure and Mortality Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These actions will contribute to mitigate not only pollution impacts on air quality (Yang and Zhang 2018), but also those on climate change . The recent decreasing trend in pollution concentrations (during 2015-2017) has been linked to the effective implementation of emissions reduction strategies by purely observation-based studies (Silver et al 2018) as well as by model simulations (Ding et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring sources of uncertainty in premature mortality estimates from fine particulate matter: the case of China

Giani

Anav

Marco

et al. 2020

Atmospheric pollution from fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) is one of the major concerns in China because of its widespread and harmful impacts on human health. In recent years, multiple studies have sought to estimate the premature mortality burden from exposure to PM 2.5 to inform policy decisions. However, different modeling choices have led to a wide array of results, with significant discrepancies both in the total mortality burden and in the confidence intervals. Here, we present a new comprehensive assessment of PM 2.5 -related mortality for China, which includes quantification of the main sources of variability, as well as of age and province-specific premature mortality trends during 2015-2018. Our approach integrates PM 2.5 observations from more than 1600 monitoring stations with the output of a high-resolution (8 km) regional simulation, to accurately estimate PM 2.5 fields along with their uncertainty, which is generally neglected. We discuss the sensitivity of mortality estimates to the choice of the exposure-response functions (ERFs), by comparing the widely used integrated exposure response functions (IERs) to the recently developed Global Exposure Mortality Models (GEMMs). By propagating the uncertainty in baseline mortalities, PM 2.5 and ERFs under a Monte Carlo framework, we show that the 95% confidence intervals of mortality estimates are considerably wider than previously reported. We thus highlight the need for more epidemiological studies to constrain ERFs and we argue that uncertainty related to PM 2.5 estimate should be also incorporated in health impact assessment studies. Although the overall mortality burden remains vast in China (~1.6 million premature deaths, according to GEMMs), our results suggest that 200 000 premature deaths were avoided and 195 billion US dollars were saved in 2018 compared to 2015, bolstering the mounting evidence about the effectiveness of China's air quality policies.

“…These new emission standards, along with other pollution control measures in the industrial sector, contributed to reductions in SO 2 , NO x and primary PM 2.5 emissions of 64%, 23% and 26% from 2011 to 2017, respectively (Zheng et al 2018). As a result, an annual reduction in PM 2.5 -related premature death of 0.25 million was achieved from 2013-2017 due to emission control (Ding et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Air quality and health impacts from the updated industrial emission standards in China

Yang

Wei

Wang

et al. 2019

To improve air quality, China has been increasing the stringency of national emission standards for industrial sectors. However, from the projected air quality and associated health impacts it is not known if the updated emission limits have been completely followed. Here, we develop emission inventories based on the emission limits at different stages and use the Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) model and health impact function to determine the potential air quality and health impacts for different scenarios. We found that full implementation of the special emission standards would decrease PM 2.5 concentrations by over 25% in April, July and October, and decrease O 3 concentrations in July by 10%-20%. Overall, the number of PM 2.5 -related premature deaths could be reduced by 0.15 million (95% confidence level 0.13-0.17 million) if special emission limits were met and that O 3 -related premature deaths would decrease by 18oo (95% confidence level 500-3000). However, even with these special emission limits, a greater than 25% increase in O 3 levels occurred in northern China during October, January and April, leading to an increase in O 3 -related premature deaths in northern provinces which would offset the decrease in provincial PM 2.5 -related mortality by 10%-20%. These findings indicate that emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) should be reduced to avoid increases in O 3 in VOC-limited provinces. Despite the increase in O 3 in certain provinces, improvement of industrial emission standards could greatly limit PM 2.5 pollution and reduce the associated health burden. Therefore, we suggest that government should accelerate full implementation of strict emission standards in order to improve air quality.