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The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Behavior of Italian Citizens and Particulate Matter 10 and 2.5 Emissions in Lombardy

Italy was one of the first nations in the world to have been heavily affected by the first wave of COVID-19. To date, it is among the first countries for both total cases and deaths. Numerous containment measures were taken from February to December 2020 to mitigate the pandemic, including total lockdowns across the entire country. The purpose of this research is to evaluate how these restrictions influenced Italian citizens' consumption habits (like online shopping, smart working and distance learning) and particulate matter (PM) 10 and 2.5 concentrations in the Lombardy region. In particular, this survey is aimed at assessing the environmental sustainability of the behaviors adopted in response to the limitations of personal freedoms on a regional and national level and quantifying the effect of the latter on particulate concentrations in Lombardy, the region most damaged by both COVID-19 and air pollution. Many tools and online platforms have been used to collect data, such as Google Trends, web portals for sharing statistical and demographic information like the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and AdminStat Italia, and surveys conducted by the Department of Civil Protection, other scientific studies, and the main national newspapers. Technical data on particulate matter was collected from the website of the Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment (ARPA). To highlight any significant change, the average daily concentrations of PM10 and 2.5 during 2020 in all the provinces of Lombardy were compared with those of the previous year. The comparison between the mean values was made through the t-test. Two values were considered as statistically confident when < 1.9 . However, since the real significance of these thresholds is not easily determined, we kept some margins of suspicious confidence. Finally, we looked for possible causal correlations between changes in citizens' behavior and specific key events related to COVID-19. To do this, Pearson and Spearman correlations were used. The P-value threshold was indicatively set at 0.05. Microsoft Excel 2020 and Google Sheets software were used for data analysis. In conclusion, this paper showed a substantial ineffectiveness of total and partial lockdowns in reducing PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations in Lombardy. Furthermore, it estimates that COVID-19 has strongly changed the consumption habits of Italian citizens, forcing them to use home delivery services more actively which, at present, poses a potential additional threat to the environment. Among the positive aspects of this change there was the learning of the most modern technologies for distance teaching and smart working, a point from which to start for the construction of an energetically and environmentally sustainable policy.