Abstract:  Ozone (O₃) pollution has come to the forefront in recent years as atmospheric fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) concentrations have declined. Given the large health risk of O₃ exposure to the population and the non-linear relationship between O₃ concentration and its precursors, nitrogen oxides (NO_X) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions, the prevention and control of O₃ pollution requires the optimization of precursor emission reduction pathways based on the analysis of the risk characteristics of O₃ population exposure. The Yangtze River Delta is a region with high O₃ concentration, large exposure, and concentrated precursor emissions in China, and the analysis of its emission reduction pathway optimization has implications for the whole country. In this study, the O₃ concentration limit of the national ambient air quality secondary standard of 160 μg/m3 was used as the target, and the O₃ pollution control effects under different abatement paths were explored based on the population exposure risk in the Yangtze River Delta region. Firstly, the WRF-CAMx model was applied to simulate 121 abatement scenarios based on different NOx and VOCs abatement ratios as the base data set, and the response surface model (RSM) was introduced to distinguish the sensitivity of O₃ to NOx and VOCs in different cities of the Yangtze River Delta, and the population exposure risk index was combined to evaluate the risk level of O₃ exposure, coupling the medium and high exposure risk areas with the control area. NOx zones and VOCs zones were set; then seven different NOx/VOCs pathways were set, the control efficiency of different pathways was analyzed, and the best emission reduction strategies for different regions were given. The study shows that cities in the central Yangtze River Delta are mainly VOCs control zones, and cities in the south and north are mainly NOx control type; the number of cities with high exposure risk in O₃ accounts for about 41% of the total number of cities, mainly concentrated in the central and northern Yangtze River Delta; considering the overall control efficiency, the paths with the highest control efficiency are NOx one-way emission reduction and VOCs one-way emission reduction for NOx and VOCs zones, respectively. Considering the control efficiency per unit step, at the early stage of emission reduction, the unit step efficiency of NOx and VOCs zones shows a trend of first decreasing and then increasing with the increase of NOx/VOCs, but with the increase of NOx emission reduction, the O3 formation mechanism in the urban grid gradually transitions from VOCs control to NOx system, and the unit step efficiency of NOx zones increases with the increase of NOx/VOCs; to ensure In order to ensure the smooth transition and control efficiency of VOCs-controlled grid, the optimal reduction ratio of VOCs reduction path is set to 1/3<NOx/VOCs<1/2, and the optimal reduction ratio of NOx reduction path is set to 1<NOx/VOCs<2, considering the "NOx adverse" effect and control efficiency.