Assessment of China’s Human Health Loss Caused by PM2.5 in 2017 Based on Remote Sensing Inversion

With the frequent occurrence of smoggy weather in China, the loss of human health caused by the fine particles has attracted much public attention. In this paper, we have adopted the MODIS aerosol product MOD04-10 km data in 2017 and the PM2.5 monitoring data of 338 cities above the prefecture/county level in China to invert the 10 km × 10 km gridded PM2.5 concentration data and use the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) index to conduct the gridded assessment of the economic burden of human health such as premature death, hospitalization and disability caused by PM2.5 in China in year 2017, to analyze the spatial differences in human health loss caused by fine particulate matter in China. The following conclusions were drawn: 1) Approximately 75.4% of China's population is exposed to areas, where the PM2.5 concentration is higher than National Standard Grade II; 2) In 2017, the number of premature deaths caused by PM2.5 nationwide was about 813,000 and the number of circulatory and respiratory inpatients was almost 1.999 million; 3) The human health loss caused by PM2.5 in China is CNY 1042.84 billion, accounting for 1.23% of GDP. Among them, the premature death loss was CNY 895.08 billion, the hospitalization loss was CNY 19.97 billion, and the disability loss was CNY 127.79 billion which are accounting for 71.2%, 1.59%, and 10.2% of overall costs respectively.