Collaborative control of fine particles and ozone required in China for health benefit

Highlights

● Increased DAAO offsets 3/4 of the decrease of DAAP in 2013–2020.

● DAAO increases are mainly due to O₃ concentration increase and population aging.

● Health benefit from PM_2.5 reduction after 2017 is larger than that before 2017.

● Reducing PM_2.5 concentration by 1% results in 0.6% reduction of DAAP.

● Reducing O₃ concentration by 1% results in 2% reduction of DAAO.

Abstract

PM_2.5 concentration declined significantly nationwide, while O₃ concentration increased in most regions in China in 2013–2020. Recent evidences proved that peak season O₃ is related to increased death risk from non-accidental and respiratory diseases. Based on these new evidences, we estimate excess deaths associated with long-term exposure to ambient PM_2.5 and O₃ in China following the counterfactual analytic framework from Global Burden Disease. Excess deaths from non-accidental diseases associated with long-term exposure to ambient O₃ in China reaches to 579 (95% confidential interval (CI): 93, 990) thousand in 2020, which has been significantly underestimated in previous studies. In addition, the increased excess deaths associated with long-term O₃ exposure (234 (95% CI: 177, 282) thousand) in 2013–2020 offset three quarters of the avoided excess deaths (302 (95% CI: 244, 366) thousand) mainly due to PM_2.5 exposure reduction. In key regions (the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Delta and the Fen-Wei Plain), the former is even larger than the latter, particularly in 2017–2020. Health benefit of PM_2.5 concentration reduction offsets the adverse effects of population growth and aging on excess deaths attributed to PM_2.5 exposure. Increase of excess deaths associated with O₃ exposure is mainly due to the strong increase of O₃ concentration, followed by population aging. Considering the faster population aging process in the future, collaborative control, and faster reduction of PM_2.5 and O₃ are needed to reduce the associated excess deaths.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Excess deaths / Long-term exposure / Fine particle / Ozone

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (China) (FRF-TP-20-056A1), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21806088) and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (China) (No. 8222066). This work was completed on the “Explorer 100” cluster system of Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (China).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-023-1692-2 and is accessible for authorized users.

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