Investigating the environmental quality deterioration and human health hazard caused by heating emissions

Highlights: • Existing heating situation and related air pollution problem in China were studied. • A novel index to evaluate the adverse impact of heating emissions was proposed. • The pollution level due to heating emissions of 66 cities in China was analyzed. • Our findings provided guidelines to improve the environment quality in China. By analyzing the status quo of the district heating energy consumption and air quality in China, it was found that with the environmental quality degradation, the previous assessment method using energy efficiency as the index cannot consider the impact on the environmental quality and human health simultaneously. Hence, to analyze the environmental quality deterioration and human health hazard due to the heating emissions, a novel assessment method was proposed and can be used to guide the improvement strategies. In this study, based on the quantitative influence of the heating emissions, urban population density and pollution duration, heating impact index (HII) as a new comprehensive evaluation index was introduced. It can be used to assess the urgency of the heating improvement in the studied regions. To estimate the air pollution status quo caused by heating emissions, 66 main heating cities in China were selected as the studied objects. The results showed that the calculated average heating emission-contributed air quality index (AQI) was 45% and polluted time percentage was 39%. The industrial emissions in 19 cities were the main reason to deteriorate the environmental quality during the heating season. While in the remaining 47 cities (71.2% of total studied cities), heating emissions dominated the deterioration of environmental quality. Subsequently, the cities with HII larger than 0.1 were divided into six levels to provide a guide for the Chinese government and relevant departments to improve the heating system and reduce human health hazard. This study can also be used as a reference for other polluted cities to investigate the environmental quality deterioration and human health hazard degrees due to the heating emissions.