Air quality, human behavior and urban park visit: A case study in Beijing Yaqiong Jiang a , Ganlin Huang a, b, * , Brendan Fisher c a Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability (CHESS), State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (ESPRE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China b School of Natural Resources, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China c Gund Institute/Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, 05405, USA article info Article history: Received 27 June 2018 Received in revised form 29 July 2019 Accepted 10 August 2019 Available online 29 August 2019 Handling Editor: Yutao Wang abstract Parks provide critical ecosystem services to urban residents. Many of these services can only be realized when people visit parks. Particulate matter exposure poses negative health impacts and may turn the health benefits brought by park visits into health risks. This tradeoff relationship is heavily moderated by how individuals behave under varying ambient air quality conditions. While there is a growing evidence base regarding the benefits brought by urban parks, little is known about how people adjust their park visitation to air pollution. Here we use two approaches to understand if air quality affects urban park visits in Beijing: a stated preference survey on social media and a year-long faceto-face survey in a neighborhood park. Quantile regression and ANOVA analysis were used. We found particulate pollution has a negative impact on the maximum number of visits a park may receive. A significant drop occurred when the pollution level changed from moderate to heavy pollution. Therefore, the ecosystem services provided by parks are not fully realized due to the reduced number of visits caused by air pollution. Second, regardless of how poor air quality is, a proportion of people (41-64%) put themselves at exposure risk to enjoy the benefits brought by parks. Third, the inconsistency between behavior and intention signals people are less protected from the potential adverse health impacts of poor air quality than they think. Future study should look into what factors may cause the divergence between people's intentions and behaviors. Understandings on this issue will contribute to design better guidance and incentives to reduce the adverse health cost of air pollution exposure from park visitation. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Urban parks and greenspace provide critical ecological and so- cial benefits to urban residents across the globe. These spaces have been shown to provide habitat (Ngiam et al., 2017), mitigate air pollution (Yang et al., 2005; Nowak et al., 2006), reduce noise (Pathak et al., 2011) and alleviate urban heat island effects (Li et al., 2012; Zhou et al., 2017). Moreover, urban parks and greenspace benefit urban residents by promoting physical exercise (Sang et al., 2016), enhancing social connections among people (Campbell et al., 2016), and reducing stress (Ulrich et al., 1991). For example, living nearby a park has been linked to greater physical exercise in the park and reduced risk of child obesity and the total number of deaths (Roemmich et al., 2006; Coutts et al., 2010). A postal survey in Gothenburg, Sweden showed that higher perceived naturalness of an area generated higher self-reported well-being for residents living nearby (Sang et al., 2016). In a cohort study of 976 elderly people in Hong Kong, researchers found geographical variation in telomere length, a marker of biological ageing. People living in areas with more parks had longer telomeres after adjusting for other factors including age, smoking, socioeconomic status and physical activity level, which indicated that a restorative environ- ment provides real health benefits (Woo et al., 2009). In China, urban parks and green spaces have been shown to encourage physical activities (Liu H, Li et al., 2017), deliver health benefits (Chen et al., 2017; Wong et al., 2017), and improve psy- chological wellbeing (Wang et al., 2016; Dong et al., 2017). Among the 300 urban parks in Beijing, the 11 parks managed by the municipal administration center of parks alone received 94 million * Corresponding author. Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability (CHESS), State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (ESPRE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China. E-mail address: ghuang@bnu.edu.cn (G. Huang). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118000 0959-6526/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 240 (2019) 118000