Environmental impacts of pre/during and post-lockdown periods on prominent air pollutants in France

Hamzaoui Ikhlasse; Duthil Benjamin; Courboulay Vincent; Medromi Hicham

doi:10.1007/s10668-021-01241-2

Environmental impacts of pre/during and post-lockdown periods on prominent air pollutants in France

Environ Dev Sustain. 2021;23(9):14140-14161. doi: 10.1007/s10668-021-01241-2. Epub 2021 Jan 23.

Authors

Hamzaoui Ikhlasse^{1

2

3}, Duthil Benjamin^{3

4}, Courboulay Vincent⁴, Medromi Hicham^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Research Foundation for Development and Innovation in Science and Engineering, 16469 Casablanca, Morocco.
² Engineering Research Laboratory (LRI), System Architecture Team (EAS), National and High School of Electricity and Mechanic (ENSEM), Hassan II University, 8118 Casablanca, Morocco.
³ EIGSI, La Rochelle, France.
⁴ Computer, Image and Interaction Laboratory (L3i), University of La Rochelle, La Rochelle, France.

Abstract

The nationwide lockdown inflicted by the global COVID-19 disease epidemic and imposed during 57 days in France was not immune to fluctuations in atmospheric pollutant concentrations. A whole range of human activities has been suspended Monday 17 March 2020 in all French regions. Since then experiments are progressing to reflect the effectiveness of reduced emissions. In this paper, we looked at variations of pollutants prior to, during and after containment period. In a first step, we proved through experiments on eight air pollutants, how all daily maximum pollutants concentration have decreased during containment phase, apart from the ozone pollutant O₃. This Ozone pollutant has indeed increased by 27.19% during lockdown period and kept growing by 21.35% as well right after deconfinement. Indeed, the maximum daily concentrations detected in different regions of France, have decreased by 18.18%, 37.14%, 20.36%, 9.28%, 44.38%, 5.1% and 44.38%, respectively, for the pollutants SO₂, NO₂, CO, C₆H₆, NOX, PM_2.5 and PM₁₀. Declining levels of other pollutants, however, were not sustained after deconfinement for NO₂, NOX and PM₁₀. We have reinforced these findings by classifying each pollutant according to the ATMO and AQI indexes, to better visualize their criticality throughout the three lockdown phases (Pre/During/Post). The family of air pollutant variables with their associated geographical sources was thereafter exploited to justify their approximate contribution to the daily mortality rates associated to COVID-19 across all French regions. However, more thorough study is still in progress to validate this finding. Finally, coming up to the abrupt changes in airborne pollutants experienced in this period, a question about future climate crisis was raised again. Whereby a weighting study has shown the current and very short-term French scenario (Status-Quo) in view of its current environmental path, the political responses made towards future climate change crisis and French investments done in this sense.

Keywords: France air pollutants concentrations analysis; Multiple correlations; Pre/during and post lockdown periods; SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19); Scenarios projection.