The COVID-19 pandemic has forced social
and economic activities to freeze across the world, as it becomes truly
globalized. A growing amount of studies suggest
enormous economic and social cost of the pandemic across the world. To fight
the spread of the disease, countries across the world impose strict social
distancing measures in the form of a partial or complete nation-wide lockdown
or nation-wide or region-specific mobility restrictions. This forces billions
of people to remain confined at homes for over two months, resulting in social
and economic costs. However, the scenario is considered a blessing in disguise
as it reduces pollution to a substantially low level (Figure 1(a) 1(b)). Lockdowns
and stay-home measures force schools and non-essential businesses to shut down,
domestic and international air travels to remain suspended, reduce vehicular
movement on roads, and industrial sites, factories, and construction sectors to
have no to minimal activity.
This
paper examines the long-run and short-run impacts of mobility changes in six
broad categories of indoor and outdoor places on carbon monoxide (CO) emissions
- one of the main air pollutants. Mobility changes are considered in six
categories of places – Residential, Transit station, Workplace, Grocery &
pharmacy, Retail & recreation, and Park. To estimate the short and long run
impacts, pooled mean group (PMG), mean group (MG), and dynamic fixed effects
(DFE) estimators are applied on daily data over the period from 15 February to
17 April 2020 months covering a panel of 35 countries.
Findings show a clear evidence that mobility changes in all categories of indoor and outdoor places have a significant long-run impact on CO emissions at the all-countries level and across eight regions evaluated. In the long-run, increases in indoor or residential mobility reduces CO emissions by about 0.9%, while mobility increases in outdoor places significantly increase CO emissions by about 0.2-0.4%. Across the regions evaluated, a relatively larger magnitude of emission impact is found for Europe excluding the EU and the UK in response to increases in both indoor and outdoor mobility. Indoor mobility increases reduce emissions in the region by about 8.4%, while increased outdoor mobility raises emissions by 1.6-4.5%.
However, there is no consistent evidence of a significant short-run impact across the regions. US-Canada is the only region showing a consistent evidence that increases in workplace mobility raise CO emissions both in the short and long run. Among all regions studied, long-run impacts of indoor and outdoor mobility changes on emissions cannot be consistently confirmed for South and Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Australia-New Zealand. Considering all analysis, the research finds that CO emissions are influenced by mobility increases primarily in residential, transit stations, and workplaces across all regions studied.
Findings overall empirically confirm and validate the increased level of acclamation of air quality improvement effects of strict social distancing and lockdown measures followed across the world to fight COVID-19 spread. Given the findings, it is important to ensure that the world does not go back to the pre-pandemic level of air pollution driven by aggressive human activities. As such, this research shows a clear evidence of air quality benefit of lesser human movement, which calls for re-thinking policies to curb unnecessary and highly-polluting outdoor mobility in the post-pandemic world.
[1] Suborna Barua, PhD is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Business, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Coordinator of OBOR Research Group - an Australia-based research platform.
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