Revealing air quality impacts of the clean heating campaign in northern China

Yichao He, Huili Wang, Yixuan Zheng, Yueyi Feng, Xiaojun Chen, Ling Jin and Yu Lei

Energy Economics, 2025, vol. 141, issue C

Abstract: To mitigate air pollution caused by bulk coal burning for heating in northern China during winter, the Chinese government initiated a clean heating campaign in Beijing and the surrounding region starting in 2017. The impact of this historic campaign remained unclear at a fine spatial and temporal resolution. Based on the annually updated high spatial resolution surveyed coal substitution data, this study coupled the multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) model with the two-stage DID model and found that bulk coal substitution would have led to a spatially and temporally averaged reduction by 4.0 μg/m3 in wintertime PM2.5 concentration over Beijing and the surrounding region. Furthermore, taking advantage of the spatially disaggregated data, spillover effects associated with air pollution transportation were further quantified. Considering these effects, the estimated air quality benefit would increase to 8.2 μg/m3. Additionally, these benefits exhibit sustainability, with the fourth year post-implementation 3.6 times greater than the initial year, suggesting cumulative effects of the policy. On average, every 1kt of bulk coal substitution resulted to 0.3 μg/m3 PM2.5 reduction at a 0.1° × 0.1° grid. These findings, validated through extensive robustness testing, underscore the effectiveness and sustainability of the clean heating campaign and would offer valuable insights for relevant policy formulation in China or other developing countries.

Keywords: Clean heating campaign; Bulk coal substitution; PM2.5; Multi-period DID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988324007874
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:eneeco:v:141:y:2025:i:c:s0140988324007874

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2024.108078

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().