Work

Mobility effect on city pollution: A case study

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The present work reports the impacts on urban mobility and air quality in Lisbon, Portugal, of the imposed restrictions to curb the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19 disease. We performed a data-driven approach over Lisbon Smart cities data, collected from several sources, such as traffic and pollution. During the first Portuguese emergency period (18-03-2020 to 03-05-2020) the sharp reductions in anthropogenic activities, most importantly road traffic, resulted in generally reduced criteria air pollutant concentration compared to an homologous baseline from 2013–2019 measured in the six air quality monitoring stations throughout the city. The most negatively impacted air pollutants were NO2, with a reduction of 54.35% in traffic stations and 28.62% in background stations. Google mobility indicator for local commerce was found to be the main anthropogenic activity indicator for Lisbon, with a moderate and positive correlation with NO 2 concentration ( r =+0.54). A regressor ML pipeline was trained to predict NO 2 concentration with the available anthropogenic activity, weather, and air pollutant inputs from March/2020 to March/2021, achieving R 2 = 0.925 on the test set.

Source: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments

DOI: 10.1177/18761364251396640

Authors: Alexandre Juma, Luis B Elvas, Joao C Ferreira, Luis Nunes

Institutions: Iscte – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação em Ciências da Informação Tecnologias e Arquitetura, Champalimaud Foundation, Molde University College, Instituto de Novas Tecnologias

Language: English

Topic: COVID-19 impact on air quality

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Good health and well-being, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,150