Efforts in reducing air pollution exposure risk in China: State versus individuals

Abstract

China has made great efforts towards air pollutant concentration control during the past five years, which has led to positive outcomes. However, air pollutant concentration focused efforts were considered separately from human exposure risk. And this might result in a misunderstanding that reducing exposure risk can only rely on the national level measures of air pollutant control. This study integrates the first Chinese survey of human activity patterns and the spatially continuous high-resolution PM_2.5 concentration maps to reveal the spatial and temporal variations of China's air pollution exposure risk from 2013 to 2017. More importantly, the effects on risk reduction from multi-scale and multi-object perspectives (reductions of ambient PM_2.5 concentrations by national or provincial measures and changes of individual behavior patterns by personal efforts) are deeply investigated. Results show that the reductions of PM_2.5 concentration and associated reductions of exposure risk from 2013 to 2017 were 40% and 35.7%, respectively. They also showed that both the reduction of PM_2.5 concentrations and change of personal behavior patterns were effective for risk reduction when China's total PM_2.5 exposure risk was higher than 1.58. However, only individual behavior changes contributed to risk reduction for scenarios with state-level risk value below 1.58. For regional strategies, threshold values for PM_2.5 exposure risk control differentiating national measures or personal efforts were spatially and temporally dependent. The role of personal behavior changes on PM_2.5 exposure risk reduction was growing in these five years with concentration rapidly decreasing regions. The findings suggest that people-centered air pollution exposure risk prevention not only depends on government management for air pollution control, but also on individual changes of activity patterns. Efforts from the state and individuals are both essential for reducing air pollution exposure risk in China, especially growing individual efforts are needed in regions with the decreasing air pollutant concentrations in the coming future. Moreover, this study mainly discussed the PM_2.5 exposure risk from the macroscopic perspective, the research at the microcosmic perspective is also needed in the further study.

Keywords: Air pollution; Exposure factors; Exposure risk; Individual exposure.