Early evidence that COVID-19 government policies reduce urban air pollution

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Authors

Marc Cadotte 

Abstract

Governments have a solemn responsibility to ensure the health and well-being of the populations they govern. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals just how serious governments take this responsibility and that restricting activity to limit pathogen spread can have other public health repercussions. Comparisons between February 2019 and 2020 air quality measures reveal that six cities that were impacted early by government restrictions in response to COVID-19 show consistent declines in five of six major air pollutants. Given that air pollution causes more than four million premature deaths annually, the declines in air pollution in response to activity changes confirm that governments have the capability to improve air quality through policy change.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/osf.io/nhgj3

Subjects

Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Keywords

Dates

Published: 2020-03-31 00:11

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License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International