Switching to electric vehicles can lead to significant reductions of PM2.5 and NO2 across China

Wang, Liqiang Chen Xue Zhang Yibo Li Mengying Li Pengfei Jiang Linhui Xia Yan Li Zhen Li Jiali Wang Lu Hou Tangyan Liu Weiping Rosenfeld Daniel Zhu Tong Zhang Yuanhang Chen Jianmin Wang Shuxiao Huang Yuanlong Seinfeld John H.; Yu, Shaocai

Summary Transportation contributes to around one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, while also causing severe air pollution. The conversion to electric vehicles (EVs) represents a major path to decarbonize the transport sector, with potentially significant co-benefits for human health. However, the scale of such co-benefits largely remains an empirical question and lacks observational evidence. The full lockdown in China during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic provides an unprecedented real-world experiment to evaluate emission reduction potentials of a large-scale transition to EVs. Here, we utilize ground and satellite observations of air quality during the full lockdown to constrain predictions of a comprehensive chemical transport model and find that the substantial traffic reductions are near-linearly linked to reductions of PM2.5 (particles with an aerodynamic diameter ≤2.5 μm) and NO2. A further extrapolation of a full conversion to EVs shows a significant reduction of PM2.5 (30%–70%) and NO2 (30%–80%) in most of China. Our findings provide fact-based evidence of potential environmental benefits generated by fully switching to EVs.