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An evaluation of air quality, home heating and well-being under Beijing’s programme to eliminate household coal use

Nature Energy volume 4, pages 416–423 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

To mitigate health and environmental effects from coal-based home heating, the Beijing Municipality has implemented a programme in 3,700 villages that subsidizes electric heat pumps and electricity, and bans coal. Here, we estimate this programme’s impact on household energy use and expenditure, well-being and indoor environmental quality by comparing treated and untreated villages in three districts that vary in socioeconomic conditions. We find that, under this programme, households in high- and middle-income districts eliminated coal use with benefits to indoor temperature, indoor air pollution and life satisfaction. In a low-income district, the policy had partial effectiveness: coal use was contingent on household wealth, and there were fewer benefits to the indoor environment and negative impacts on well-being. These results suggest that a rapid household energy transition can be effective, but it is essential to appropriately control subsidies and fine-tune supports to limit transitional hardships for the less affluent.

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Fig. 1: Coal storage and heating equipment.
Fig. 2: Study site locations within Beijing.

Beijing Office of Rural Affairs (map outline)

Fig. 3: Heating and expenditure for coal and electricity.
Fig. 4: Coal use versus wealth.
Fig. 5: Subjective evaluations of well-being.
Fig. 6: Cumulative distributions of indoor 24-h PM2.5 concentrations.
Fig. 7: Cumulative distributions of observed daytime temperature.

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Data availability

Datasets generated and analysed during this study will be made available on a case-by-case basis on request to the corresponding author, with input from the co-authors, subject to compliance with Research Ethics Board restrictions for the survey data.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to A. Ballyk and M. Smailes for research assistance, and S. Harper and R. Ravishankara for comments on a draft of the manuscript. This work was supported by a McGill University Emerging Scholars Accelerator grant and by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grants 435-2016-0531 and 430-2017-00998.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Christopher Barrington-Leigh & Jill Baumgartner

  2. Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Jill Baumgartner

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Ellison Carter

  4. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Brian E. Robinson

  5. Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Shu Tao

  6. College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yuanxun Zhang

  7. CAS Center for Excellence in Regional Atmospheric Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China

    Yuanxun Zhang

Authors
  1. Christopher Barrington-Leigh
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  2. Jill Baumgartner
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  4. Brian E. Robinson
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  6. Yuanxun Zhang
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Contributions

C.B.-L., J.B., E.C. and B.R. designed the study, led the field work and wrote the paper. C.B.-L. and E.C. carried out the analysis. C.B.-L., J.B., E.C., B.R., S.T. and Y.Z. discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher Barrington-Leigh.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–12, Supplementary Figs. 1–9, Supplementary Notes 1 and 2, Supplementary References

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Barrington-Leigh, C., Baumgartner, J., Carter, E. et al. An evaluation of air quality, home heating and well-being under Beijing’s programme to eliminate household coal use. Nat Energy 4, 416–423 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0386-2

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