Singapore entered a two-month partial lockdown in April 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19. The imposed measures in addition to contain the virus spread, cut the emissions of greenhouse gases as many economic activities stopped across the city. The advice of stay-at-home changed the pattern of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions within the community. To examine how CO2 emissions responded to the COVID-19 measures at neighborhood scale, anonymized mobility data released by Google and Apple, and traffic congestion information from TomTom were used to track daily and diurnal changes in emissions related to driving, cooking and metabolic breathing in a residential neighborhood of Singapore, in which the anthropogenic and biogenic fluxes of CO2 have been widely characterized. During the lockdown, traffic emissions dropped 41%, but emissions from cooking and metabolic breathing increased 21% and 20%, respectively. The uptake of CO2 by vegetation was not able to offset these emissions, and after adding the biogenic contribution from soil and plants, a net reduction of 24% was found. During the following six months the city got its pace back, with the rate of CO2 emissions reaching similar or slightly higher levels than those predicted before the pandemic crisis. Unfortunately, the stark drop in emissions was just a temporary relief, which reduced only 3.5% the annual CO2 flux over the studied neighborhood.
Keywords: COVID-19 lockdown; Carbon dioxide; Mobility trends; Net CO2 flux; Urban emissions.
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