Co-benefit and co-control studies in Norway

Abstract

In both developing and industrialized countries, abatement of air pollution and mitigation of climate change have generally been treated separately. Co-benefits of air quality and climate change related policies are often addressed on national or supranational level, to document that costs of policies are acceptable, especially when ancillary benefits are considered. On local or regional level, until now the focus has been mainly on air quality management, not considering benefits for climate change mitigation. Today?s air quality management requires integrated and coordinated measures where urban air quality planning includes also greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate change issues. The tools available for investigating scenarios for reducing local impacts and health effect improvements can also be used to investigate cost effective actions aimed at reducing GHG emissions. This approach would lead to identification of strategies that consider co-benefits of climate and local air quality measures, and will both improve the health of people and give climate benefits at best possible costs. Approaches based on an existing air quality management tool, prepared for co-benefit studies in Norway as well as plans for co-control projects in China are presented in this paper. These approaches have the potential to focus on issues not included in traditional air pollution abatement studies.