Spatiotemporal evolution of urban air quality and socioeconomic driving forces in China

Abstract

Air pollution is a serious problem brought by the rapid urbanization and economic development in China, imposing great challenges and threats to population health and the sustainability of the society. Based on the real-time air quality monitoring data obtained for each Chinese city from 2013 to 2014, the spatiotemporal characteristics of air pollution are analyzed using various exploratory spatial data analysis tools. With spatial econometric models, this paper further quantifies the influences of socioeconomic factors on air quality at both the national and regional scales. The results are as follows: (1) From 2013 to 2014, the percentage of days compliance of urban air quality increased but air pollution deteriorated and the worsening situation in regions with poor air quality became more obvious. (2) Changes of air quality show a clear temporal coupling with regional socioeconomic activities, basically "relatively poor at daytime and relatively good at night". (3) Urban air pollution shows a spatial pattern of "heavy in the east and light in the west, and heavy in the north and light in the south". (4) The overall extent and distribution of regional urban air pollution have clearly different characteristics. The formation and evolution of regional air pollution can be basically induced as "the pollution of key cities is aggravated-pollution of those cities spreadsregional overall pollution is aggravated-the key cities lead in pollution governance-regional pollution joint prevention and control is implemented-regional overall pollution is reduced". (5) At the national level, energy consumption, industrialization and technological progress are the major factors in the worsening of urban air quality, economic development is a significant driver for the improvement of that quality. (6) Influenced by resources, environment and the development stage, the socioeconomic factors had strongly variable impacts on air quality, in both direction and intensity in different regions. Based on the conclusion, the regional differentiation and development idea of the relationship between economic development and environmental changes in China are discussed.

Corporate Social Responsibility, the Atmospheric Environment, and Technological Innovation Investment

“…Drawing on the practices of previous scholars, we used the following proxy variables for the atmospheric environment [46]: the average number of days in each province in 2016 that had an air quality of Grade 2 and above, and the average number of days nationally in 2016 that had an air quality of Grade 2 and above. When the average number of days in each province was higher than the average number of days in the country, then the atmosphere in the provinces in which the enterprises were located was good.…”

Spatiotemporal characteristics of urban air quality in China and geographic detection of their determinants

“…To explore the underlying differences and factors of the AQI, we divided the sample cities into eight sub-regions ( Figure 1 and Table 1). The principle of our division is to maintain the homogeneity within the same region and the heterogeneity among different regions, in which both the physical factors and socio-economic factors are taken into full consideration (Liu et al, 2016;Lin et al, 2016). Specifically speaking, the sub-regions are illustrated as follows.…”

“…Urban air quality in China has attracted much interest from multi-disciplinary perspectives, among which the regional disparity of air pollution is an important one. Most of the studies have explored the spatial spillover effect and regional homogeneity characteristics of air pollution in China from different spatial dimensions, ranging from nationwide to urban agglomerations and specific cities (Sun et al, 2012;Fang et al, 2016;Lin and Wang, 2016;Peng et al, 2016;Gong and Zhang, 2017). To account for the regional variation of air quality, many researchers have examined the influencing factors relevant to urban air quality.…”

“…To account for the regional variation of air quality, many researchers have examined the influencing factors relevant to urban air quality. In these studies, factors as meteorological elements, land use and land cover change, urbanization, industrialization, energy structure, and transport patterns have been reported to have significant impact on urban air quality (Krummel et al, 1984;Shaw et al, 2010;Tai et al, 2010;Zhang and Fan, 2011;Guan et al, 2014;Lu and Han, 2014;Patton et al, 2014;Li et al, 2015;Lin and Wang, 2016;Qin and Liao, 2016;Sun et al, 2016;Zou et al, 2016;Hu et al, 2017;Yan et al, 2017). The previous studies, in general, have predominantly observed the characteristics of determinants within a single region or among different cities.…”

An air quality composite index based on pollutant concentration factor analysis

“…In recent years, research by geographers into urban air quality has focused on two aspects, one is the change characteristics of air quality, the other research aspect is one that emphasizes influential factors, giving rise to a lot of valuable results (Lin and Wang, 2016).…”