A Study on Spatiotemporal Performances of the Urban Atmospheric Environment Carrying Capacity in 35 Large Chinese Cities from 2015 to 2019

In the past decades, the urbanization of Chinese cities is unsustainable, which needs to consume a lot of resources and cause heavy atmospheric pollution. Being aware of this problem, governments have implemented stringent policies and measures to control atmospheric pollution. To evaluate if these policies and measures are effective, this study introduces the concept of urban atmospheric environment carrying capacity (UAECC) and applies the UAECC threshold method and Spearman rank correlation coefficient method to detect the spatiotemporal performances of the UAECC. 35 large Chinese cities are selected as objectives that are representative and valuable for this study. The results show that the UAECC performances for 35 large cities, especially severely overloaded cities have improved in 2015–2019 due to the implementation of atmospheric pollution control measures. However, they still face overloaded risks of PM2.5, PM10, and O3. The UAECC of PM2.5 and PM10 have a common distribution that cities with the good performances of UAECC concentrate in southeastern coastal and southwestern regions in China.