Spatial-temporal analysis of urban air pollution related exposure and health impacts: Driving human-centered regulation and control

Abstract

Climate change has resulted in frequent extreme disasters and scarce resources, leading to a massive population into cities for favorable survival conditions, and also increasing urban air pollution burdens. It is urgent to assess population health risks related with urban air pollution, which usually relies on census method and meteorological measurement data. However, health impacts may be underestimated, because of challenges to represent the dynamic population mobility and perform unified analysis of different pollution hazards. The contribution of this work is to combine census data with Location Based Service to identify the spatiotemporal mobility pattern of urban population, and then population-weighted exposure (PWE) and health impacts of various air pollution (PM_2.5, O₃, and NO₂) are synergistically evaluated. Taking Nanjing as the study area, it was found that the pollution peak areas correlated with population mobility in the study region, shifting from urban suburbs to the center during the daytime, with the maximum concentration exceeding 165 μg/m³. O₃ caused a relatively high PWE level and had a greater health impact than PM_2.5 and NO₂, adding the mortality by up to 5 % especially on weekdays. The annual health impact of O₃ was approximately twice that of PM_2.5 and NO₂. Human-centered regulation strategies of urban air pollution were proposed in terms of personnel behaviors, government control, and urban design towards mitigation of air pollution risk and sustainable urban development.