Ambiguous Pollution Response to COVID-19 in China

Abstract

Reductions in ambient pollution have been taken as an indisputable "silver lining" to the COVID-19 Pandemic.Indeed, worldwide economic contraction induced by COVID-19 lockdowns should generate global air quality improvements ceteris paribus, including to China's notoriously-poor air quality.We analyze China's official pollution monitor data and account for the large, recurrent improvement in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lock-downs in 2020.With the important exception of NO 2 , China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province.Compared with LNY improvements experienced in 2018 and 2019 in Hubei, we see smaller improvements in SO 2 while ozone concentrations increased in both relative and absolute terms (roughly doubling).Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei.We conclude that COVID-19 had ambiguous impacts on China's pollution, with evidence of relative deterioration in air quality near the Pandemic's epicenter.