Saving the world from your couch: The heterogeneous medium-run benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns on air pollution

Abstract

In Spring 2020, COVID-19 led to an unprecedented halt in public and economic life across the globe. In an otherwise tragic time, this provides a unique natural experiment to investigate the environmental impact of such a (temporary) "de-globalization". Here, we estimate the medium-run impact of a battery of COVID-19 related lockdown measures on air quality across 162 countries, going beyond the existing short-run estimates from a limited number of countries (

Aerosol Loading and Radiation Budget Perturbations in Densely Populated and Highly Polluted Indo‐Gangetic Plain by COVID‐19: Influences on Cloud Properties and Air Temperature

“…The dense population can result regional high AOD (Ramachandran & Cherian, 2008; Wang et al., 2017). Recent studies (e.g., Bonardi et al., 2021; Khatri & Hayasaka, 2021) showed a weak influence of lockdown measures on household air pollutant reduction, suggesting that such high AOD could be possible over densely populated IGP even without active emissions from commercial and transportation sectors. As there was decrease in AOD over upwind regions during lockdown period (Pandey & Vinoj, 2021), such high AODs were less likely due to the effects of human activities of upwind regions.…”

The lock-down effects of COVID-19 on the air pollution indices in Iran and its neighbors

“…The decline and changes of NO 2 , PM 2.5 and PM 10 have been observed in many countries from the first to the mid of Q2 of 2020 (15-May-2020) (Venter et al 2020;Xing et al 2021;Bonardi et al 2021) and most countries and regions have a lot of lock-down days in this period (Venter et al 2020): Pakistan (Mehmood et al 2021a;Mehmood et al 2021b;Khan 2021;Aslam et al 2021), Afghanistan and India (Mishra and Kulshrestha 2021;Gautam et al 2021), Turkmenistan (Zhang 2021), Azerbaijan (Bonardi et al 2021), Armenia (Bonardi et al 2021), Turkey (Ghasempour et al 2021Dursun et al 2022), Iraq (Hashim et al 2021;Hashim et al 2021), Kazakhstan (Kerimray et al 2020), Bahrain (Benchrif et al 2021;Qaid et al 2022), Kuwait (Halos et al 2021), Oman (Bonardi et al 2021), Qatar (Mahmoud et al 2022), Saudi Arabia (Ghanim 2021;Habeebullah et al 2022;Anil and Alagha 2021;Morsy et al 2021), UAE (Alqasemi et al 2021;Teixidó et al 2021;Alalawi et al 2022;Shanableh et al 2022), Asia (Baniasad et al 2021) and Iran (Moazeni 2021;Broomandi et al 2020;Keshtkar 2022;Norouzi and Asadi 2022).…”

Environment—lockdown, air pollution and related diseases: could we learn something and make it last?

“…Lockdowns of 44 cities reduced human movements by 69.85%, and a reduction in the AQI, PM2.5 and CO was partially mediated by human mobility, and SO 2 , PM10 and NO 2 were completely mediated. 15 Lockdown showed, according to Copat et al 16 in their study in 176 countries, clear environmental changes of reduced human activity, and a global average reduction in PM2.5 concentrations of 35–45%. It is therefore important to study the interaction between infections and environmental factors of chronic diseases such as chemical toxicants, air pollution, climate change and socio-economic determinants.…”