Impact on global air quality due to reduced mobility from COVID-19 related shutdowns

A recent global outbreak of infectious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) originated in late December of 2019 in Wuhan, a province of China. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic — a worldwide spread of the disease. To contain the spread and transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have responded to this unique societal health pandemic based on the intensity of health effects in their region, their financial capability, and resource provisions. Different levels of interventions including the closing of non-essential businesses, travel restrictions, and degrees of lockdown intensities have helped to contain the transmission and spread of COVID-19. These interventions have led to reduced emissions of air pollutants from the energy sector and other industries, as well as significantly reduced traffic volume due to stay-at-home policies. These strict stay-at-home policy initiatives at global, national, and local levels of government have led to an unprecedented noticeable change in global pollution emission and pollutant concentration in ambient air due to the rapid decrease in economic activity and associated human mobility. Therefore, understanding this temporary improvement in the air quality at a global scale provides a unique opportunity to study interrelated social, health, and environmental processes and lessons for long-term policy changes to reduce air pollution in the future. In this presentation, we explore the global timeline and geospatial variation or variability of changes in air quality due to stay-at-home orders worst hit by COVID-19.