关键词: 重污染天, PM2.5, 健康影响, 经济损失

Abstract: In order to explore the historical annual heavily PM2.5 polluted days and their health loss, the study constructs a daily air quality dataset for 31 provinces of China from 2001 to 2013. Further, it evaluates the health impacts especially the premature death and the economic loss due to the heavy PM2.5 pollution days of each year since 2001 for each province, by applying the latest results of dose-response in epidemiologic studies and taking account of the age structure of population as well as valuation approaches. The result shows that since 2001, heavily polluted situation (above the defined threshold, here the 2nd grade of air quality standard is applied for practical reason) for PM2.5 occurred in 71 percent of the provinces on a yearly basis. Although the average concentration of heavily polluted days did not have much variations during the thirteen years and the trend went down during 2001–2012 in terms of occurrence, heavily polluted situation increased dramatically in frequency in 2013. As a result, the proportion of heavily polluted days in 2013 was the highest during 2001–2013. It is estimated that over 65000 premature deaths was caused by heavy PM2.5 pollution days in 2013, which can be assessed as the 28.1 billion Yuan loss in economic term, 54 percent of the total economic loss in these thirteen years equivalently. The surge of economic loss in 2013 was attributed to the lasting heavy PM2.5 pollution in January 2013 and eight provinces in eastern and middle China.

Key words: heavily polluted days, PM2.5, health impact, economic loss