Impact of Singapore's COVID-19 confinement on atmospheric CO 2 fluxes at neighborhood scale

• Published in: Urban climate Vol. 37; p. 100822
• Main Author: Velasco, Erik
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands 01.05.2021
• Subjects: Mobility trends; Urban emissions; COVID-19 lockdown; Net CO2 flux; Carbon dioxide

Singapore entered a two-month partial lockdown in April 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19. The imposed measures in addition to contain the virus spread, cut the emissions of greenhouse gases as many economic activities stopped across the city. The advice of stay-at-home changed the pattern of carbon dioxide (CO ) emissions within the community. To examine how CO emissions responded to the COVID-19 measures at neighborhood scale, anonymized mobility data released by Google and Apple, and traffic congestion information from TomTom were used to track daily and diurnal changes in emissions related to driving, cooking and metabolic breathing in a residential neighborhood of Singapore, in which the anthropogenic and biogenic fluxes of CO have been widely characterized. During the lockdown, traffic emissions dropped 41%, but emissions from cooking and metabolic breathing increased 21% and 20%, respectively. The uptake of CO by vegetation was not able to offset these emissions, and after adding the biogenic contribution from soil and plants, a net reduction of 24% was found. During the following six months the city got its pace back, with the rate of CO emissions reaching similar or slightly higher levels than those predicted before the pandemic crisis. Unfortunately, the stark drop in emissions was just a temporary relief, which reduced only 3.5% the annual CO flux over the studied neighborhood.