Transportation Air Pollution in China: The Ongoing Challenge to Achieve a ‘Blue Sky’

Abstract

Air pollution is one of China’s most prevalent environmental issues, and it comes at an annual cost of over 1 million lives and around 0.66% of China’s GDP. Economic growth coupled with extensive motorisation has caused transport and specifically road transport to be a key contributor to air pollution through the emissions of PM2.5, NOx and O3 in particular. The Chinese government, over the last decade, has introduced an ambitious set of policies and measures to improve air quality, increasingly integrating its management with climate change management. This chapter provides an overview of general air quality policy frameworks and the measures that are specifically directed at reducing the transport impact. These include national emission standards, fuel consumption targets and fuel quality standards and the electrification of the vehicle fleet, for both private and public transport. Assessing the impact of these individual measures is difficult due to the multiple factors that determine air quality, although generally emissions of some air pollutants have decreased significantly in recent years—but others persisted or became worse.