report making-assess the immediate and after effects of covid 19 on air quality of sikkim
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Explanation:
The fatal novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic disease smashes the normal tempo of global socio-economic and cultural livelihood. Most of the countries impose a lockdown system with social distancing measures to arrest the rapid transmission of this virus into the human body. The objective of this study is to examine the status of air quality during and pre-COVID-19 lockdown and to recommend some long-term sustainable environmental management plan. The pollution data like PM10, PM2.5, O3, SO2, NO2 and CO have been obtained from State Pollution Control Board under Govt. of West Bengal. Similarly, various land surface temperature (LST) maps have been prepared using LANDSAT-8 OLI and LANDSAT-7 ETM + images of USGS. The maps of NO2 and aerosol concentration over Indian subcontinent have been taken from ESA and NASA. The digital thematic maps and diagrams have been depicted by Grapher 13 and Arc GIS 10.3 platforms. The result shows that the pollutants like CO, NO2 and SO2 are significantly decreased, while the average level of O3 has been slightly increased in 2020 during the lockdown due to close-down of all industrial and transport activities. Meanwhile, around 17.5% was the mean reduction of PM10 and PM2.5 during lockdown compared with previous years owing to complete stop of vehicles movement, burning of biomass and dust particles from the construction works. This study recommends some air pollution-tolerant plant species (in urban vacant spaces and roof tops) for long-term cohabitation among environment, society and development.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (10.1007/s10668-020-00898-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Keywords: COVID-19, Lockdown system, Air quality, Parameters, Sustainable
Introduction
The normal rhythm of livelihood of the people exclusively world’s economy, socio-cultural compatibility, national and international political waves, academic atmosphere, and moreover people’s regular lifestyle has been incredibly disrupted due to the fatal novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The outbreak of catastrophic coronavirus (COVID-19) occurred during the end of December 2019 and creates the gigantic turmoil particularly in socio-economic backbone of the nations (Tian et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2020a, b). The novel coronavirus has been emerged as an extraordinary disastrous influence worldwide. On December 29, 2019, this new infectious disease was first identified at Wuhan City, the capital of Hubei Province in China (Huang et al. 2020a, b; Zhou et al. 2020a, b; Zhu et al. 2020). After detecting a lot of positive cases throughout the country, the Government of China imposed countrywide lockdown system to regulate the transmission of infectivity and wanted to reduce the excessive pressure on health infrastructure (Wilder-Smith and Freedman 2020).The World Health Organization (WHO) authenticated the fact related with the contagious nature of coronavirus through human globules inhalation during January 2020 (WHO 2020e).WHO has declared that the COVID-19 is a sixth Public Health Emergency of International Concern (on January 30, 2020) because of the enormous aftermath of this fatal disease throughout the world (Wee et al. 2020; WHO 2020c).The global transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) and its harmful impacts have been started to transmit through human interaction from February 2020. Many relevant studies revealed that COVID-19 is a severe respiratory infectious disease which can attack the whole respiratory system and lungs of human being (Gautam and Trivedi 2020; Chen et al. 2020). Italian Institute of Health clearly notified that around 481 people, who were previously suffering due to acute illness, have now lost their lives because of the attack of fatal COVID-19 (Gautam 2020a). In this context, the old-age persons are considered to be extremely vulnerable as the rate of contagion and mortality are noticeably higher in this age group (≥ 65 years) (Zhou et al. 2020a, b; Gautam and Hens 2020).
As the COVID-19 disease has been originated from the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, WHO declared as COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020 (WHO 2020d). Coronavirus has snatched 3,00,000 lives including 4.5 million confirmed cases around 216 countries across the world as of May 15, 2020 (WHO 2020a). The social distancing measure has been enforced by Chinese Government and it is widely accepted as a compulsory defensive technique to deal with coronavirus pandemic whenever there is no other substitute to combat against this lethal disease (Huang et al. 2020a, b; Zhang et al. 2020). Almost half population of the world has compelled to sustain their lives under lockdown