Source-receptor relationship of transboundary particulate matter pollution between China, South Korea and Japan: Approaches, current understanding and limitations

Abstract

Transboundary particulate matter (PM) pollution in Northeast Asia has raised tremendous concerns in China, South Korea, and Japan, leading to a proliferation of publications in recent years. This article summarizes the existing knowledge on the source-receptor relationship (SRR) of transboundary PM pollution between China, South Korea, and Japan with a focus on approaches, current understanding, and limitations. We found that eastern-, northern- and northeastern China are the most contributing source areas within China to PM pollution in both South Korea and Japan, but it remains debatable whether China contributes more PM pollution to South Korea or Japan than those countries themselves. Considerable differences have been reported in the estimations of China’s relative contributions to receptor countries, and higher estimations were usually obtained from studies that focused on short time periods, used outdated emission inventories, and had few or no international collaboration. China’s contributions range from 26% to 56% for South Korea and from 13.6% to 53.9% for Japan if the analysis periods are limited to one or several years and the receptors are limited to an entire country. We attributed these differences to the discrepancies in the analysis periods, analytical approaches, modeling settings, definitions of source and receptors, and international collaboration. We also demonstrated that current SRR studies face the challenges from data quality issues in PM measurement data and emission inventories, limited temporal and spatial scales in modeling, and limited analytical perspectives concerning the allocation of environmental responsibilities. Suggestions for future research are provided to address these challenges.

 

Graphical abstract

Keywords:

• Transboundary particulate matter pollution
• source area
• source-receptor relationship
• Northeast Asia
• data quality

HANDLING EDITORS:

• Daniel Tsang and Robert Letcher

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Hyung-min Lee, Jinkyul Choi, Dr. Byeong-Uk Kim, Dr. Hye-Ryun Oh and Prof. Chang-Hoi Ho for sharing data on the relative contributions of source regions to South Korea in their publications.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Science Research Base Program of Fujian at the Research Centre of Public Service Quality of Xiamen University (Grant No. FJ2020JDZ006) and a Start-up grant from Xiamen University Nanqiang Outstanding Young Talents Program (Grant No. X2303301).