In search of bluer skies: Would people move to places of better air qualities?

Abstract

This study examines the statistical relationship between people's movements and difference in air quality between the origin and the destination, using computational social science approach. We put forward an important environmentally driven human movement question: Would people move to places of better air qualities? Utilizing Twitter Streaming API, 39,928,132 randomized geo-coded tweets posted by 8,551,557 individual users during the period of 01/01/2016 – 31/12/2017 were extracted to examine the movements of Twitter users. Coupling Twitter users’ international movements with air quality data, our results have shown that Twitter users tend to move to places of better air qualities in general. We find that in most countries, the net move-out rate tends to be positively correlated with the monthly PM2.5 concentration in the origin country, and the number of international movements to the destination country is negatively correlated with the decrease in PM2.5 concentration in the origin country. For domestic movements, our results have shown that Twitter users in Indian cities, including Mumbai, one of the largest and highly polluted cities, tend to move to other Indian cities of better air qualities. Our results confirm that people across different parts of the world tend to move to places of better air qualities.