The Alerting Effect from Rising Public Awareness of Air Quality on the Outdoor Activities of Megacity Residents

Ki-Kwang Lee, YoungKi Park, Sang-Pil Han and Hyun Cheol Kim
Additional contact information
Ki-Kwang Lee: School of Business Administration, Dankook University, Yongin 16890, Korea
YoungKi Park: Department of Information Systems & Technology Management, School of Business, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Sang-Pil Han: Department of Information Systems, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
Hyun Cheol Kim: Air Resources Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, College Park, MD 20740, USA

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: This study investigated how the public awareness of air quality affects people’s decisions to participate in outdoor activities. Given that the keyword search volume of particulate matter (PM) in Seoul, South Korea started to grow dramatically only after November 2013, we defined two periods (low and high public awareness of PM) and conducted a series of comparative analyses to investigate the impact of public awareness of air quality on the relationship between PM level and people’s outdoor activities. In the low public awareness period, people’s outdoor activities measured by the number of daily subway passengers did not significantly vary over PM levels, even in the ’unhealthy’ range (80 < PM 10 < = 150 µg/m 3 ). On the contrary, during the high awareness period, people’s activities were significantly affected by the PM level, even in the ’moderate’ range. Specifically, the perceived safety threshold of PM 10 level that people use to decide for engaging outdoor activities has decreased from 120 to 70 µg/m 3 . These results suggest that public awareness of air quality and its harmful ramifications on health is a key determinant of outdoor activities rather than PM 10 concentration itself. Thus, this study alludes to a need for more timely and effective dissemination of air quality information to the public as much as for curbing anthropogenic emissions.

Keywords: air pollution; particulate matter; public awareness; outdoor activity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/3/820/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/3/820/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:3:p:820-:d:312067

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().