Complex urban air quality has long been assessed by a single (or major) contaminant, for example, fine particulate matter (PM2.5), but scant attention has been given to multicontaminant air pollution, especially in countries with severe air pollution, for example, China. We thus proposed an improved method for quantifying both single- and multicontaminant air pollution. Our approach uses China's major cities as an example because they have an operational national urban air quality monitoring network. We found that our proposed method could remove the duplicated consideration under both single- and multicontaminant conditions, thus proving to be an improved and more accurate way to understand complex urban air pollution conditions. Our method involved monitoring 3 contaminants (PM2.5, PM10, and SO2 ) in cities in Shanxi, Shandong, Henan, and Hebei Provinces and 2 contaminants (PM2.5 and PM10) in the cities between the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, and these pollutants were the major contributors to multicontaminant air pollution. We argue that both the research community and the government should pay increased attention to multicontaminant air pollution beyond the current single major pollutant-based air pollution method when building a sustainable city. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;16:306-313. © 2020 SETAC.
Keywords: Air pollution; Population exposure; Sustainable cities; Trade-off; Urbanization.
© 2020 SETAC.