School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210023, China.
Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing 210023, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 May 3;19(9):5534. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19095534.
Air pollution imposes detrimental impacts on residents' health and the general quality of life. Quantifying the influential mechanism of air pollution on residents' happiness and the economic value brought by environmental quality improvement could provide a scientific basis for the construction of livable cities. This study estimated urban residents' willingness to pay for air pollution abatement by modeling the spatial relationship between air quality and self-rated happiness with a Bayesian multi-level ordinal categorical response model. Using large-scale geo-referenced survey data, collected in the Bohai Rim area of China (including 43 cities), we found that a standard deviation decrease in the number of polluted days over a year was associated with about a 15 percent increase in the odds of reporting a higher degree of happiness, after controlling for a wide range of individual- and city-scale covariate effects. On average, urban residents in the Bohai Rim region were willing to pay roughly 1.42 percent of their average monthly household income for mitigating marginal reductions in air pollution, although great spatial variability was also presented. Together, we hoped that these results could provide solid empirical evidence for China's regional environmental policies aiming to promote individuals' well-being.
空气污染对居民健康和整体生活质量造成有害影响。量化空气污染对居民幸福感的影响机制以及环境质量改善带来的经济价值，可以为宜居城市建设提供科学依据。本研究通过建立空气质量与自评幸福感之间的空间关系模型，采用贝叶斯多层次有序分类响应模型来估计城市居民对空气污染减排的支付意愿。利用在中国渤海湾地区（包括 43 个城市）收集的大规模地理参考调查数据，我们发现，在控制了广泛的个人和城市规模协变量效应后，一年中污染天数减少一个标准差与报告更高程度幸福感的几率增加约 15%相关。平均而言，渤海湾地区的城市居民愿意为缓解边际空气污染减少支付其平均月家庭收入的 1.42%左右，尽管也存在很大的空间变异性。我们希望这些结果能够为中国旨在促进个人福祉的区域环境政策提供有力的经验证据。
