Air quality, human behavior and urban park visit: A case study in Beijing

摘要

Parks provide critical ecosystem services to urban residents. Many of these services can only be realized when people visit parks. Particulate matter exposure poses negative health impacts and may turn the health benefits brought by park visits into health risks. This tradeoff relationship is heavily moderated by how individuals behave under varying ambient air quality conditions. While there is a growing evidence base regarding the benefits brought by urban parks, little is known about how people adjust their park visitation to air pollution. Here we use two approaches to understand if air quality affects urban park visits in Beijing: a stated preference survey on social media and a year-long faceto-face survey in a neighborhood park. Quantile regression and ANOVA analysis were used. We found particulate pollution has a negative impact on the maximum number of visits a park may receive. A significant drop occurred when the pollution level changed from moderate to heavy pollution. Therefore, the ecosystem services provided by parks are not fully realized due to the reduced number of visits caused by air pollution. Second, regardless of how poor air quality is, a proportion of people (41-64%) put themselves at exposure risk to enjoy the benefits brought by parks. Third, the inconsistency between behavior and intention signals people are less protected from the potential adverse health impacts of poor air quality than they think. Future study should look into what factors may cause the divergence between people's intentions and behaviors. Understandings on this issue will contribute to design better guidance and incentives to reduce the adverse health cost of air pollution exposure from park visitation. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.