SATELLITE-BASED CHINA’S PM_2.5 POLLUTION AND ASSOCIATED PREMATURE MORTALITY MEASUREMENT OVER PAST TWO DECADES

Abstract

Assessments of the burden of air pollution at the national scale over long-term of time in China would help government managers control historic health impacts of air pollution and institute measures to avoid these risks in future. We took a new 0.01° × 0.01° satellite-based PM2.5 dataset to analyse spatial and temporal trends of PM2.5 associated premature mortality in China from 1998 to 2017. Results showed that national PM2.5 related deaths from STK, IHD, COPD, LC and ALRI increased from approximately 0.89 million cases in 1998 to the peak of 1.34 million in 2014 and steady declined to 1.17 million cases in 2017. The health burden exhibited strong spatial variations, with high attributable deaths concentrated in regions such as Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Beijing, Guangdong, et al. Changing trends varied from different provinces such as Shandong increased mostly, and Sichuan showed a significant decreasing trend. Meanwhile, the results also showed that the expand directions of premature mortality was similar to that of population and the changing of absolute number of premature mortality more depended on the growth of PM2.5 concentration. The findings recommend that government should make better policies to the health risk controlling which take population and pollution into consideration than only focus on pollution concentration.