Changes in China's anthropogenic emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns led to a sharp drop in socio-economic activities in China in 2020, including reductions in fossil fuel use, industry productions, and traffic volumes. The short-term impacts of lockdowns on China's air quality have been measured and reported, however, the changes in anthropogenic emissions have not yet been assessed quantitatively, which hinders our understanding of the causes of the air quality changes during COVID-19. Here, for the first time, we report the anthropogenic air pollutant emissions from mainland China during the first eight months of 2020 by using a bottom-up approach based on the near real-time data. The COVID-19 lockdown was estimated to have reduced China's anthropogenic emissions substantially between January and March in 2020, with the largest reductions in February. Emissions of SO2, NOx, CO, NMVOCs, and primary PM2.5 were estimated to have decreased by 29 %, 31 %, 27 %, 26 %, and 21 %, respectively, in February 2020 compared to the same month in 2019. The reductions in anthropogenic emissions were dominated by the industry sector for SO2 and PM2.5 and were contributed approximately equally by the industry and transportation sectors for NOx, CO, and NMVOCs. With the spread of coronavirus controlled, China's anthropogenic emissions rebounded in April and since then returned to the comparable levels of 2019 in August 2020. The provinces in China have presented nearly synchronous decline and rebound in anthropogenic emissions, while Hubei and the provinces surrounding Beijing recovered slower due to the extension of lockdown measures. The reduction ratios of anthropogenic emissions from 2019 to 2020 can be accessed from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5214920.v1 (Zheng et al., 2020) by species, month, sector, and province.