TY - JOUR
T1 - Attribution of Air Quality Benefits to Clean Winter Heating Policies in China
T2 - Combining Machine Learning with Causal Inference
AU - Song, Congbo
AU - Liu, Bowen
AU - Cheng, Kai
AU - Cole, Matthew A.
AU - Dai, Qili
AU - Elliott, Robert J.R.
AU - Shi, Zongbo
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was supported by fundings from UK Research and Innovation─Natural Environment Research Council (2021GRIP02COP-AQ), UK Research and Innovation─Natural Environment Research Council NE/R005281/1), the IGI Clean Air Theme at the University of Birmingham, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42177085). C. Song holds the position of Senior Research Scientist funded by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), UK. We would like to thank the University of Birmingham’s BlueBEAR HPC service ( www.birmingham.ac.uk/bear ), which provides a high-performance computing service to run RF models and data analysis, the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for providing the HYSPLIT model to analyze the back trajectories and Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and authors of “rmweather”, “worldmet” and “augsynth” R packages.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.
PY - 2023/2/1
Y1 - 2023/2/1
N2 - Heating is a major source of air pollution. To improve air quality, a range of clean heating policies were implemented in China over the past decade. Here, we evaluated the impacts of winter heating and clean heating policies on air quality in China using a novel, observation-based causal inference approach. During 2015-2021, winter heating causally increased annual PM
2.5, daily maximum 8-h average O
3, and SO
2 by 4.6, 2.5, and 2.3 μg m
-3, respectively. From 2015 to 2021, the impacts of winter heating on PM
2.5 in Beijing and surrounding cities (i.e., "2 + 26" cities) decreased by 5.9 μg m
-3 (41.3%), whereas that in other northern cities only decreased by 1.2 μg m
-3 (12.9%). This demonstrates the effectiveness of stricter clean heating policies on PM
2.5 in "2 + 26" cities. Overall, clean heating policies caused the annual PM
2.5 in mainland China to reduce by 1.9 μg m
-3 from 2015 to 2021, potentially avoiding 23,556 premature deaths in 2021.
AB - Heating is a major source of air pollution. To improve air quality, a range of clean heating policies were implemented in China over the past decade. Here, we evaluated the impacts of winter heating and clean heating policies on air quality in China using a novel, observation-based causal inference approach. During 2015-2021, winter heating causally increased annual PM
2.5, daily maximum 8-h average O
3, and SO
2 by 4.6, 2.5, and 2.3 μg m
-3, respectively. From 2015 to 2021, the impacts of winter heating on PM
2.5 in Beijing and surrounding cities (i.e., "2 + 26" cities) decreased by 5.9 μg m
-3 (41.3%), whereas that in other northern cities only decreased by 1.2 μg m
-3 (12.9%). This demonstrates the effectiveness of stricter clean heating policies on PM
2.5 in "2 + 26" cities. Overall, clean heating policies caused the annual PM
2.5 in mainland China to reduce by 1.9 μg m
-3 from 2015 to 2021, potentially avoiding 23,556 premature deaths in 2021.
KW - air pollution
KW - causal inference
KW - clean heating
KW - machine learning
KW - weather normalization
KW - winter heating
U2 - 10.1021/acs.est.2c06800
DO - 10.1021/acs.est.2c06800
M3 - Article
C2 - 36722723
AN - SCOPUS:85147421271
SN - 0013-936X
JO - Environmental Science and Technology
JF - Environmental Science and Technology
ER -
