A095-0017
The Environmental Impacts of COVID-19 in Texas: an Integrative, Multivariate Geospatial Analysis and Mapping Software

Thursday, 10 December 2020
Poster
Sarah Preston1, Annie Xu1, Mitchell Osborn1, Sylvia Dee1, Ted Loch-Temzelides2, Mark A Torres1, Caroline A Masiello1, Daniel S Cohan3, Chima Adiole1, Nathan Botton4, Samantha Breaux1, Melinda Ding1, Benjamin Gelman4, Lingkun Guo1, Lucia Lu1 and Joanne Zhou1, (1)Rice University, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Houston, TX, United States, (2)Rice University, Department of Economics, Houston, TX, United States, (3)Rice University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Houston, TX, United States, (4)Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States
Abstract:
COVID19 has myriad indirect impacts on both human and natural environments. An unexpected by-product of the pandemic is an ongoing and abrupt reduction in major sectors contributing to environmental pollution and climate change. While these effects are unintentional, environmental scientists are nevertheless presented with an unprecedented natural laboratory: quarantine policies implemented throughout 2020 unlock an experimental setting for constraining the regional environmental impacts given substantial, rapid environmental mitigation. Incremental closures facilitate partitioning individual contributions of various societal and economic functions to environmental pollution; such attribution is normally impossible.

This study presents a synthesis of the environmental fallout of COVID19 in the state of Texas. Data spanning January-July 2020 is employed to characterize environmental changes on a local to regional scale. To quantify emerging trends in environmental variables, we investigate three key research questions: (1) Which environmental indicators most effectively track environmental and climate change?; (2) What trends exist at the local and regional level for Houston and Texas for local-to- regional air and water quality and greenhouse gas emissions?; and (3) Environmental pollution has been shown to directly aggravate COVID19 symptoms; what level of codependency between environmental quality and health impacts emerges during the pandemic, given that abrupt, simultaneous changes in both are incredibly rare? We present results produced by an undergraduate research team mapping the environmental fallout of COVID19 in real time for the state of Texas. We find modest reductions in air pollutants and Carbon Dioxide in metropolitan areas coeval with state-wide closures. Long-term metrics for environmental quality are coupled to socioeconomic indicators and evaluated for correlation to COVID19 susceptibility. Our new mapping software updates environmental changes based on the real-time evolution of human behavior in response to COVID19 policies. We envision studies such as this which characterize the effectiveness of extreme, short-term environmental mitigation in Texas can inform future environmental policy at the state and national level.

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