Air quality in London: evidence of persistence, seasonality and trends
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Air quality in London: evidence of persistence, seasonality and trends Luis A. Gil-Alana 1,2
&
OlaOluwa S. Yaya 3,4 & Nieves Carmona-González 2
Received: 15 May 2020 / Accepted: 16 June 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The poor air quality in the London metropolis has sparked our interest in studying the time series dynamics of air pollutants in the city. The dataset consists of roadside and background air quality for seven standard pollutants: nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), ozone (O3), particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) and sulphur dioxide (SO2), using fractional integration to investigate issues such as persistence, seasonality and time trends in the data. Though we notice a large degree of heterogeneity across pollutants and a persistent behaviour based on a long memory pattern is observed practically in all cases. Seasonality and decreasing linear trends are also found in some cases. The findings in the paper may serve as a guide to air pollution management and European Union (EU) policymakers. JEL classification C22 . Q53 . Q58
1 Introduction The quality of air in London has improved significantly over the past decades (Browne et al. 2007; Colette et al. 2011; EEA 2017; Andrade et al. 2018; Lang et al. 2019), but exceedances of the legislative limit values still persist in some pollutants such as ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matters (PM10 and PM2.5), in both background and roadside datasets. London failed to meet the air quality European Union (EU) standard since 2010, largely due to diesel vehicles on its roads which resulted in high emissions of NO 2 , and congestion has further
* Luis A. Gil-Alana [email protected] OlaOluwa S. Yaya [email protected]; [email protected] Nieves Carmona-González [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
2
Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, Spain
3
Environmental Statistics Unit, Department of Statistics, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
4
Centre for Econometric and Allied Research, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
compounded the effect of diesel fumes in the city. Diesel engines release NOx, and large concentrations of NO2 are experienced along roadsides in urban areas (Gardner and Dorling 1999; Font and Fuller 2016). In 2016, 43 breaches of annual pollution were recorded in London. In 2017, the first breach of annual pollution limits was experienced in London, less than 10 days into the New Year, and this continued for about a month into 2018. However, for the first 3 months in 2010, no breach occurred (King’s College 2019). Currently, people in London still live under poor air quality; however, NO2 levels are falling and could reach the normal level for living in the next 6 years. The NO2 and particulate matters exceed the EU standard, particularly during winter and early spring, not only in London but also in many other European cities (Bessagnet et al. 2005; Petit et al. 2017; etc.). Based
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