The global and regional air quality impacts of dietary change.

Air pollution increases cardiovascular and respiratory-disease risk, and reduces cognitive and physical performance. Food production, especially of animal products, is a major source of methane and ammonia emissions which contribute to air pollution through the formation of particulate matter and ground-level ozone. Here we show that dietary changes towards more plant-based flexitarian, vegetarian, and vegan diets could lead to meaningful reductions in air pollution with health and economic benefits.

EU climate action through an energy poverty lens.

Carbon pricing can steer energy choices towards low-carbon fuels and foster energy conservation efforts. Simultaneously, higher fossil fuel prices may exacerbate energy poverty. A just portfolio of climate policies therefore requires a balanced instrument mix to jointly combat climate change and energy poverty.

Economy-wide impacts of road transport electrification in the EU.

While electrification of road transport is a key component of decarbonisation, the implications for the broader economy and related jobs remain underexplored. We quantify these impacts in the EU in a global Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, combining techno-economic assumptions about electric vehicles with deployment scenarios derived by energy models. We augment input-output tables underlying the JRC-GEM-E3 model with an explicit representation of vehicle manufacturing and upgrade the modelling of vehicle purchase and operation.

Climate policy design, competitiveness and income distribution: A macro-micro assessment for 11 EU countries.

Concerns about industry competitiveness and distributional impacts can deter ambitious climate policies. Typically, these issues are studied separately, without giving much attention to the interaction between the two. Here, we explore how carbon leakage reduction measures affect distributional outcomes across households within 11 European countries by combining an economy-wide computable general equilibrium model with a household-level microsimulation model.

Global roll-out of comprehensive policy measures may aid in bridging emissions gap.

Closing the emissions gap between Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the global emissions levels needed to achieve the Paris Agreement's climate goals will require a comprehensive package of policy measures. National and sectoral policies can help fill the gap, but success stories in one country cannot be automatically replicated in other countries. They need to be adapted to the local context.

Bridging between economy-wide activity and household-level consumption data: Matrices for European countries.

This dataset represents bridging matrices between two different data classification systems: consumption by purpose (COICOP) and products by activity (CPA). While the former classification is used in household budget and expenditure surveys, the latter represents the industry sector dimension that is typically adopted in national accounts and input-output tables. We collect input data from Eurostat on total household consumption for 35 COICOP and 63 CPA categories for the year 2015.

Air quality co-benefits for human health and agriculture counterbalance costs to meet Paris Agreement pledges.

Local air quality co-benefits can provide complementary support for ambitious climate action and can enable progress on related Sustainable Development Goals. Here we show that the transformation of the energy system implied by the emission reduction pledges brought forward in the context of the Paris Agreement on climate change (Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) substantially reduces local air pollution across the globe. The NDCs could avoid between 71 and 99 thousand premature deaths annually in 2030 compared to a reference case, depending on the stringency of direct air pollution controls.