COVID-19 Full Lockdowns Expose Significant Air Quality Benefits Towards Electric Vehicles in China

Electric vehicles (EVs) represent a major path for global decarbonization, improvement of air quality and promotion of renewable energy. To tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, China imposed full lockdowns and thorough travel restrictions. This event represents an unprecedented inadvertent geoengineering experiment in vehicle emissions, emulating transition to EVs. Here we novelly exploited observations of air quality during the full lockdown to constrain predictions of a comprehensive chemical transport model. Large traffic flux reductions were near-linearly linked to reductions of NO 2 and PM 2.5 (correlation = 0.491 ~ 0.626). Extrapolating to a full conversion to EV results in a large reduction of PM 2.5 (30 ~ 70%) in most of central and south eastern China. A smaller reduction of PM 2.5 (10 ~ 20%) in Beijing and Tianjin was achievable due to the presence of major industrial emission sources which cause haze at a regional scale. The potential reductions in NO 2 were 40 ~ 90% in most of the megacities. At this present crossroads of policy, our findings reveal timely evidence supporting the transition towards renewable energy. Funding: This study is supported by the Department of Science and Technology of China (No. 2016YFC0202702, 2018YFC0213506 and 2018YFC0213503), National Research Program for Key Issues in Air Pollution Control in China (No. DQGG0107) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21577126, 41561144004, 21625701). Pengfei Li is supported by Initiation Fund for Introducing Talents of Hebei Agricultural University (412201904) and Youth Top Fund of Universities in Hebei Province (BJ2020032). Conflict of Interest: Authors declare no competing interests.