Clean air for some: Unintended spillover effects of regional air pollution policies

Fang et al., Sci. Adv. 2019; 5: eaav4707 24 April 2019 SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE 1 of 10 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES Clean air for some: Unintended spillover effects of regional air pollution policies Delin Fang1, Bin Chen1*, Klaus Hubacek2,3,4,5*, Ruijing Ni6, Lulu Chen6, Kuishuang Feng4*, Jintai Lin6 China has enacted a number of ambitious pollution control policies to mitigate air pollution in urban areas. Un intended side effects of these policies to other environmental policy arenas and regions have largely been ignored. To bridge this gap, we use a multiregional input output model in combination with an atmospheric chemical transport model to simulate clean air policy scenarios and evaluate their environmental impacts on pri mary PM2.5 and secondary precursor emissions, as well as CO 2 emissions and water consumption, in the target region and spillover effects to other regions. Our results show that the reduction in primary PM2.5 and secondary precursor emissions in the target regions comes at the cost of increasing emissions especially in neighboring prov inces. Similarly, co benefits of lower CO2 emissions and reduced water consumption in the target region are achieved at the expense of higher impacts elsewhere, through outsourcing production to less developed regions in China.