Volume 13: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part II

Unequal city resident’s exposure to PM 2.5 -A case study of Shanghai Yin Long*, Peiran Li, Alexandros Gasparato, Deljana Iossifova, Nannan Dong

Abstract

Due to speeding up urbanization and increasing living standards of city residents, environmental consequence of both production and consumption activities have raised air pollution issue as one of major concern worldwide. Among varied air pollutants, PM2.5 does only contribute to respiratory diseases, but also causing cardiopulmonary, ischemic disease, etc. It may further cause extremely unequal impact on age or affluence-based population groups, due to its varying spatial concentration. To investigate its exposure to citizens from economical aspect, we firstly extract affluence-based residents in Shanghai city, China, based on the most recent housing price and population data, then analyzed its potential exposure to PM2.5 across the year of 2019. Direction analysis is applied to comparing the varied exposure levels to PM2.5 by affluence-specific population. Results suggest the highest PM2.5 exposure is found in the central wards of Shanghai, which is also featured by average housing price over 40,000 yuan. People living in 60,000 yuan above housing of Shanghai city are exposed to the highest PM2.5 pollution, in winter in particular.

Keywords City; PM2.5; Spatial distribution; Citizen Affluence; Standard deviational ellipse