Beyond Clean Air Zones and Traffic Electrification: Lessons from Covid-Lockdowns and Clean Air Inter
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Air pollution is the single biggest environmental risk, causing approximately 30,000 deaths and £20b economic loss every year in the UK. Improving air pollution will not only benefit the public health but also the economy. In the past few years, a range of air quality interventions, whether intentional (e.g., clean air zone) or unintentional (e.g., COVID lockdowns), were implemented. These offered great opportunities to examine what measures may or may not work in improving air quality. In this talk, I firstly introduced a novel machine learning and synthetic control approach to evaluate these interventions. This approach is designed to remove the impacts of weather and other factors on air quality, the prerequisite to quantify the impacts of interventions themselves. I then quantified the impacts of COVID-lockdowns, clean air zone in Birmingham and low emission zone in London on air quality, both on nitrogen dioxide, ozone and PM2.5. I explained why clean air zones are not effective in improving public health. Whether traffic electrification is sufficient to improve UK’s air quality to meet WHO guidelines for protecting public health was also shown. Finally, I gave a few thoughts on potential ways to further improve air quality in the UK.
This was a 45 minute talk followed by 15 minutes for Q&A. The meeting opened from 5:50 pm for attendees to join and the event started promptly at 6 pm.
Speaker
Professor Zongbo Shi, University of Birmingham
Zongbo Shi started his career as a geologist, gaining a BA degree at Anhui University of Science and Technology, China. After studying for one and half years in Sedimentology at China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), he was directly enrolled as a PhD student for his outstanding academic performance. During his PhD work, he investigated physico-chemical properties and bio-reactivity of urban aerosols and dust in Beijing. He then went to Tsinghua University working on fog and haze processing of primary particles (e.g., vehicle exhaust particles) and the sources of urban aerosols in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Ningbo. These works were part of the major air pollution mitigation consortium projects which developed air pollution control strategies in these cities. He was then granted a JSPS fellowship with a total funding of more than 1 million JPY to work in Prefectural University of Kumamoto, Japan where he focused on ageing of the Asian dust and its impact on their chemical compositions and hygroscopic properties. Subsequently, he worked at School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds to work on a NERC-funded project where he combined his knowledge of geochemistry with atmospheric sciences and global aerosol modelling to understand the atmospheric processing of iron and phosphorous in mineral dust.
He joined the University of Birmingham in 2011 as a NERC fellow and also the first Birmingham Fellow. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017, Reader in 2019 and Professor in 2020. His current research aims at improving the estimation of the deposition fluxes of bioavailable iron, phosphorous and trace metals to the global ecosystems. This is approached by a combination of field measurements of atmospheric depositions and atmospheric aerosols, laboratory simulations of atmospheric processes, and global transport modelling simulations.
Research interests include global biogeochemical cycles, atmospheric chemistry and environmental geochemistry.
Registration
REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED
Air pollution is the single biggest environmental risk, causing approximately 30,000 deaths and £20b economic loss every year in the UK. Improving air pollution will not only benefit the public health but also the economy. In the past few years, a range of air quality interventions, whether intentional (e.g., clean air zone) or unintentional (e.g., COVID lockdowns), were implemented. These offered great opportunities to examine what measures may or may not work in improving air quality. In this talk, I firstly introduced a novel machine learning and synthetic control approach to evaluate these interventions. This approach is designed to remove the impacts of weather and other factors on air quality, the prerequisite to quantify the impacts of interventions themselves. I then quantified the impacts of COVID-lockdowns, clean air zone in Birmingham and low emission zone in London on air quality, both on nitrogen dioxide, ozone and PM2.5. I explained why clean air zones are not effective in improving public health. Whether traffic electrification is sufficient to improve UK’s air quality to meet WHO guidelines for protecting public health was also shown. Finally, I gave a few thoughts on potential ways to further improve air quality in the UK.
This was a 45 minute talk followed by 15 minutes for Q&A. The meeting opened from 5:50 pm for attendees to join and the event started promptly at 6 pm.
Speaker
Professor Zongbo Shi, University of Birmingham
Zongbo Shi started his career as a geologist, gaining a BA degree at Anhui University of Science and Technology, China. After studying for one and half years in Sedimentology at China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), he was directly enrolled as a PhD student for his outstanding academic performance. During his PhD work, he investigated physico-chemical properties and bio-reactivity of urban aerosols and dust in Beijing. He then went to Tsinghua University working on fog and haze processing of primary particles (e.g., vehicle exhaust particles) and the sources of urban aerosols in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Ningbo. These works were part of the major air pollution mitigation consortium projects which developed air pollution control strategies in these cities. He was then granted a JSPS fellowship with a total funding of more than 1 million JPY to work in Prefectural University of Kumamoto, Japan where he focused on ageing of the Asian dust and its impact on their chemical compositions and hygroscopic properties. Subsequently, he worked at School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds to work on a NERC-funded project where he combined his knowledge of geochemistry with atmospheric sciences and global aerosol modelling to understand the atmospheric processing of iron and phosphorous in mineral dust.
He joined the University of Birmingham in 2011 as a NERC fellow and also the first Birmingham Fellow. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017, Reader in 2019 and Professor in 2020. His current research aims at improving the estimation of the deposition fluxes of bioavailable iron, phosphorous and trace metals to the global ecosystems. This is approached by a combination of field measurements of atmospheric depositions and atmospheric aerosols, laboratory simulations of atmospheric processes, and global transport modelling simulations.
Research interests include global biogeochemical cycles, atmospheric chemistry and environmental geochemistry.
Registration
REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED
