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Declining short-term emission control opportunity for major events in Chinese cities

Nature Cities volume 2, pages 434–446 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

In China, short-term emission controls have been implemented widely in the host and nearby cities of major events to reduce air pollution. However, insufficient analysis of their effectiveness has weakened the design of pollution controls. In this study, we analyzed the impact of short-term controls on nitrogen oxide emissions and quantified their main drivers in both the host and neighboring cities of 11 events held in east China from 2010 to 2023. We found that short-term controls might be more effective in neighboring cities than in host cities for some events, and that their benefits in terms of reduced emissions have weakened over time. Furthermore, the main sector of emission abatement for events has shifted from power to industry and transportation, reflecting the evolution of emission controls and the relative dominance of air-pollution budgets for different sectors. Our analysis highlights the enhanced targeting of short-term air pollution controls for Chinese cities, which also supports the long-term policy design.

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Fig. 1: Improvements of RETOMI2 compared with POMINO, POMINO-TROPOMI and MAX-DOAS.
Fig. 2: Seven-day moving averages of the total NOx emissions for the three host cities during the 11 major events.
Fig. 3: Decomposition of the changing NOx emissions for the host cities during the main control periods by sector.
Fig. 4: Effectiveness of short-term controls in the host and neighboring cities for major events.
Fig. 5: Effect of meteorology and emission variation on NO2 concentrations.

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Data availability

The tropospheric NO2 column data from POMINO, POMINO-TROPOMI and GOME-2 were taken from http://www.pku-atmos-acm.org/acmProduct.php/ and https://www.temis.nl/. Meteorological variables were downloaded from the ERA5 hourly atmospheric reanalysis dataset (accessible at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets/). Population density data were obtained from WordPop (https://hub.worldpop.org/geodata/summary?id=44833). The bottom-up emissions were taken from the Multiple-resolution Emission Inventory for China (http://www.meicmodel.org). The data produced in this study (RETOMI2 and the a posteriori emissions of NOx for the 11 events), as well as the source data for Figs. 1–5, are available via Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/d8b9b6e8b9f34ab5bdc8 (ref. 49). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes for predicting NO2 TVCDs using XGBoost and DINEOF and for estimating the a posteriori NOx emissions are available via Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/d8b9b6e8b9f34ab5bdc8 (ref. 49).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the free use of tropospheric NO2 column data from the POMINO, POMINO-TROPOMI and GOME-2 sensors from http://www.pku-atmos-acm.org/acmProduct.php/ and https://www.temis.nl/. We also thank the data support from the National Earth System Science Data Center, National Science and Technology Infrastructure of China (http://www.geodata.cn). This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFC3709802, Y.Z.) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42177080, Y.Z.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse and School of Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Hanying Wang & Yu Zhao

  2. School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China

    Qin He & Kai Qin

  3. Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Hao Kong & Jintai Lin

  4. Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Ecological Remediation and Carbon Sequestration, Institute of Environment and Ecology, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China

    Bo Zheng

  5. State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Sources and Control of Air Pollution Complex, Beijing, China

    Bo Zheng

  6. Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology (CICAEET), Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Yu Zhao

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Contributions

Conceptualization and methodology: H.W. and Y.Z.; formal analysis and investigation: H.W. and Y.Z.; writing (original draft): H.W. and Y.Z.; writing (review and editing): all authors; visualization: H.W.; code method support: H.W., Q.H., H.K., K.Q. and J.L.; data support: J.L. and B.Z.; supervision and project administration: Y.Z.

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Correspondence to Yu Zhao.

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Nature Cities thanks Daiwen Kang, Minghao Qiu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wang, H., He, Q., Kong, H. et al. Declining short-term emission control opportunity for major events in Chinese cities. Nat Cities 2, 434–446 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00233-x

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