Abstract
The overlap in sources of greenhouse gas and local air pollutant emissions creates scope for policy measures to limit global warming and improve air quality simultaneously. In a first step, we derive estimates for the air pollution mortality-related component of the social cost of atmospheric release for 6 pollutants and 56 regions in the world. Combining these estimates with emission inventory data highlights that sector contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution health impacts differ widely across regions. Next, simulations of future emission pathways consistent with the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets illustrate that strengthening climate policy ambition raises the total value of air quality co-benefits despite lower marginal co-benefits per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions abated. Finally, we use results from a multi-model ensemble to quantify and compare the value of health-related ambient air quality co-benefits of climate policy across sectors and regions. On the global level, overall air quality co-benefits range from $8 to $40 per tonne of greenhouse gases abated in 2030, with median across models and scenarios of $18/tCO2e. These results mask strong differentiation across regions and sectors, with median co-benefits from mitigation in the residential and service sectors in India exceeding $500/tCO2e. By taking a sector- and region-specific perspective, the results presented here reveal promising channels to improve human health outcomes and to ratchet up greenhouse gas reduction efforts to bridge the gap between countries’ pledges and the global targets of the Paris Agreement.
Highlights
The overlap in sources of greenhouse gas and local air pollutant emissions creates scope for policy measures to limit global warming and improve air quality simultaneously
Earlier work has shown that climate policy can have substantial co-benefits by reducing premature deaths related to air pollution (West et al 2013), while recent work illustrates that the co-benefit value can exceed greenhouse gas mitigation costs in the context of the Paris Agreement (Markandya et al 2018; Vandyck et al 2018; Rauner et al 2019)
The results indicate high co-benefit values per tonne of CO2e abated for the transport and residential sectors in Poland, Sub-Sahara Africa, China and India, while the agriculture, forestry, land use and waste and transport sectors rank high relative to other sectors in terms of co-benefits per tonne of CO2e abated in France, Germany and the USA
Summary
The overlap in sources of greenhouse gas and local air pollutant emissions creates scope for policy measures to limit global warming and improve air quality simultaneously. We derive estimates for the air pollution mortality-related component of the social cost of atmospheric release for 6 pollutants and 56 regions in the world Combining these estimates with emission inventory data highlights that sector contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution health impacts differ widely across regions. We aim to reveal opportunities for targeted policy actions that exploit the synergies between climate change and air pollution by disaggregating region-specific data and model results to the sector level. The main contribution of present study is to highlight air quality–climate synergies and trade-offs across sectors and regions based on historical emission inventory data, the global energy system model POLES-JRC and the multi-model ensemble of the Energy Modeling Forum 30 (EMF-30), with the aim of informing policies with an integrated perspective on sustainability. The last section presents a discussion, lays out the main policy conclusions and offers suggestions for future work
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