Decoding the Effect of Demographic Factors on Environmental Health Based on City-Level Pm2.5 Pollution in China

Although air quality improvement action plans may have resulted in considerable health effects, it can be amplified or offset due to the complexity and uncertainty of changing demographic factors. In this study, we develop a framework for analyzing the effect of demographic factors on environmental health effect, focusing on three aspects: Population size, spatial distribution of population, and population aging. Based on analyzing the PM2.5-related premature deaths in China from 2015 to 2020, we quantified the three above effects by investigating how the health endpoint changed by the three population related factors respectively, holding other factors constant. We found that the decrease of PM2.5 has resulted in the avoidance of 260,000 premature deaths from 2015 to 2020. However, increasing population size and population aging offset the health effects of air quality improvements. The change in population spatial distribution, in general, amplify the health effects of air quality improvements. Furthermore, these effects are distributed unevenly across regions