Quantifying air quality co-benefits of climate policy across sectors and regions

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, an outcome we term here as the atmospheric double dividend. We first explore the potential for an atmospheric double dividend by drawing from emissions inventory data. Next, we use an energy system model and 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 a global average, air quality co-benefits range from -48 to 561 dollar per tonne of greenhouse gases abated across sectors in 2030. These results mask strong regional differentiation, with co-benefits from mitigation in industry in North and South America, agriculture in Europe and the transport and residential sectors in Asia being relatively high compared to other sectors in these regions. A wide spread across models and negative values for some region-sector combinations indicate that climate policy design is crucial in achieving synergies for climate and air pollution. Co-benefits per tonne of greenhouse gases abated are generally higher in earlier years (2020-2030) and when biomass use is limited, which further emphasizes the potential role of air pollution in catalysing early climate action with an integrated perspective. 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.

VANDYCK Toon;  KERAMIDAS Kimon;  TCHUNG-MING Stephane;  WEITZEL Matthias;  VAN DINGENEN Rita; 

2020-12-18

SPRINGER

JRC116853

0165-0009 (online),   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC116853,   

10.1007/s10584-020-02685-7 (online),