The impact of COVID 19 on air pollution levels and other environmental indicators - A case study of Egypt

Abstract

The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) not only affected health and economics, but also its effect extended to include other aspects, such as the environment. Using Egypt as a case study, this paper presents the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on air pollution levels by studying nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), ozone (O 3 ), particulate matter represented in absorbing aerosol index (AAI), carbon monoxide (CO), and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The paper also highlights the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on other environmental indicators including environmental noise, medical and municipal solid wastes. The paper presents the Egyptian COVID-19 story from its different angles including the development of confirmed COVID-19 cases, containment measures from the government, the impact on the country’s economy and the national energy consumption so as to effectively evaluate the effect on both the air pollution levels and the other studied environmental indicators. For the other environmental indicators, a strong link was observed between COVID-19 lockdown and the reduction in environmental noise, beaches, surface and groundwater pollution. For environmental noise, this has been confirmed by officially governmental announcements which reported that the level of environmental noise in Egypt was reduced by about 75% during the lockdown period. On the other hand, there are some negative effects, including an increase in medical solid waste (from 70 to 300 ton/day), municipal solid waste, as well as a less efficient solid waste recycling process. For air pollution levels, the data were obtained from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency satellite data sets. The data for the lockdown period in 2020 have been extracted and compared to the corresponding months in the selected baseline period (2015-2019) to identify the effect that the lockdown period had on the air pollution levels in Egypt with focus on Cairo and Alexandria governorates. It was found that the AAI decreased by about 30%, the NO 2 decreased by 15 and 33% over Cairo and Alexandria governorates, respectively, and that the CO decreased by about 5% over both governorates. In addition, the GHG emissions in Egypt were reduced by at least 4% during the pandemic. In contrast, ozone levels increased by about 2% over Cairo and Alexandria governorates. It can be concluded that the implemented containment measures during COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in both positive and negative environmental impacts. The positive environmental impacts are not sustainable and deterioration on them is expected to occur after the lockdown as it was before the pandemic. Therefore, stricter laws must be enacted to protect the environment in Egypt.

The impacts of human migration and city lockdowns on specific air pollutants during the COVID-19 outbreak: A spatial perspective

“…53.4%, failed to meet national air quality standards in 2019. 2 The outbreak of COVID-19 brought unprecedented impacts on human activities, and in turn on the environment ( Mostafa et al, 2021 ), which is expected to increase general understanding of current environment conditions and to trigger new strategies for reducing pollution.…”

“…There is a growing literature studying and trying to estimate the impact of the pandemic on air pollution. Evidence of reductions in air pollution following the outbreak of the pandemic was found in many regions, such as Egypt ( Mostafa et al, 2021 ), the USA ( Liu et al, 2021 ), the UK ( Ropkins and Tate, 2021 ), and India ( Singh et al, 2020 ; Vadrevu et al, 2020 ). In the context of China, several recent studies found similar evidence that the variation in air pollution concentration in many regions of China dropped significantly during the pandemic ( Bao and Zhang, 2020 ).…”

Radiative Effect and Mixing Processes of a Long-Lasting Dust Event over Athens, Greece, during the COVID-19 Period

“…Similarly, an air pollution level reduction was also observed in many cities all over the world (Canada, Brazil, India, Cairo, Southeast Asia, etc.) [46,[58][59][60][61][62]. Therefore, the importance of this study lies in the specific conditions which prevailed during the COVID-19 lockdown period in spring 2020, namely: (i) the very low levels of air pollution in Athens due to reduced emissions, (ii) the duration of the dust transport (more than 10 days), and (iii) the intensity of the dust event (high levels of layer aerosol optical depth (AOD) > 0.3-0.4 at 535 nm).…”

Effects of COVID-19 on the environment: An overview on air, water, wastewater, and solid waste

“…This has been observed in China (Y. Chen et al, 2020 ; Li et al, 2020 ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Pei et al, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020 ; Yao et al, 2020a ; Zhao et al, 2020 ), Brazil ( Dantas et al, 2020 ; Júnior et al, 2019 ; Nakada and Urban, 2020 ), Egypt ( Mostafa et al, 2021 ), India ( Mahato et al, 2020 ; Mahato and Ghosh, 2020 ; Mor et al, 2021 ; Sarfraz et al, 2020 ), Italy ( Bontempi, 2020 ; Fattorini and Regoli, 2020 ), Spain ( Baldasano, 2020 ; Briz-Redón et al, 2021 ; Martorell-Marugán et al, 2021 ), the United States of America USA (L. W. A. Chen et al, 2020 ; Q.…”