Efforts in reducing air pollution exposure risk in China: State versus individuals

•Air pollution and associated exposure risks are decreasing in China since 2013.•Personal air pollution exposure behaviors show significant spatial discrepancies.•China’s air pollution exposure risk can be prevented by both the state and individuals’ efforts.•Localized measures for reducing air pollution exposure risk across China are needed.•Personal behavior changes play a growing role in reducing air pollution exposure risk. China has made great efforts towards air pollutant concentration control during the past five years, which has led to positive outcomes. However, air pollutant concentration focused efforts were considered separately from human exposure risk. And this might result in a misunderstanding that reducing exposure risk can only rely on the national level measures of air pollutant control. This study integrates the first Chinese survey of human activity patterns and the spatially continuous high-resolution PM2.5 concentration maps to reveal the spatial and temporal variations of China’s air pollution exposure risk from 2013 to 2017. More importantly, the effects on risk reduction from multi-scale and multi-object perspectives (reductions of ambient PM2.5 concentrations by national or provincial measures and changes of individual behavior patterns by personal efforts) are deeply investigated. Results show that the reductions of PM2.5 concentration and associated reductions of exposure risk from 2013 to 2017 were 40% and 35.7%, respectively. They also showed that both the reduction of PM2.5 concentrations and change of personal behavior patterns were effective for risk reduction when China’s total PM2.5 exposure risk was higher than 1.58. However, only individual behavior changes contributed to risk reduction for scenarios with state-level risk value below 1.58. For regional strategies, threshold values for PM2.5 exposure risk control differentiating national measures or personal efforts were spatially and temporally dependent. The role of personal behavior changes on PM2.5 exposure risk reduction was growing in these five years with concentration rapidly decreasing regions. The findings suggest that people-centered air pollution exposure risk prevention not only depends on government management for air pollution control, but also on individual changes of activity patterns. Efforts from the state and individuals are both essential for reducing air pollution exposure risk in China, especially growing individual efforts are needed in regions w