Environmental impacts of pre/during and post-lockdown periods on prominent air pollutants in France

Hamzaoui Ikhlasse (), Duthil Benjamin, Courboulay Vincent and Medromi Hicham
Additional contact information
Hamzaoui Ikhlasse: Research Foundation for Development and Innovation in Science and Engineering
Duthil Benjamin: EIGSI
Courboulay Vincent: University of La Rochelle
Medromi Hicham: Research Foundation for Development and Innovation in Science and Engineering

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2021, vol. 23, issue 9, No 66, 14140-14161

Abstract: Abstract The nationwide lockdown inflicted by the global COVID-19 disease epidemic and imposed during 57 days in France was not immune to fluctuations in atmospheric pollutant concentrations. A whole range of human activities has been suspended Monday 17 March 2020 in all French regions. Since then experiments are progressing to reflect the effectiveness of reduced emissions. In this paper, we looked at variations of pollutants prior to, during and after containment period. In a first step, we proved through experiments on eight air pollutants, how all daily maximum pollutants concentration have decreased during containment phase, apart from the ozone pollutant O3. This Ozone pollutant has indeed increased by 27.19% during lockdown period and kept growing by 21.35% as well right after deconfinement. Indeed, the maximum daily concentrations detected in different regions of France, have decreased by 18.18%, 37.14%, 20.36%, 9.28%, 44.38%, 5.1% and 44.38%, respectively, for the pollutants SO2, NO2, CO, C6H6, NOX, PM2.5 and PM10. Declining levels of other pollutants, however, were not sustained after deconfinement for NO2, NOX and PM10. We have reinforced these findings by classifying each pollutant according to the ATMO and AQI indexes, to better visualize their criticality throughout the three lockdown phases (Pre/During/Post). The family of air pollutant variables with their associated geographical sources was thereafter exploited to justify their approximate contribution to the daily mortality rates associated to COVID-19 across all French regions. However, more thorough study is still in progress to validate this finding. Finally, coming up to the abrupt changes in airborne pollutants experienced in this period, a question about future climate crisis was raised again. Whereby a weighting study has shown the current and very short-term French scenario (Status-Quo) in view of its current environmental path, the political responses made towards future climate change crisis and French investments done in this sense.

Keywords: SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19); France air pollutants concentrations analysis; Pre/during and post lockdown periods; Multiple correlations; Scenarios projection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-021-01241-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:23:y:2021:i:9:d:10.1007_s10668-021-01241-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-021-01241-2

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().