AI Article Synopsis
- Scientists found that global warming can make air quality worse even if pollution stays the same, which they call a "climate change penalty."
- They ran different tests to see how future climate changes and different pollution rules would affect air quality in China by 2050, finding that stricter pollution controls can significantly help.
- With the best pollution controls, they estimate that fewer people would die from air pollution compared to if no changes were made, but some health risks would still remain due to climate change.
Article Abstract
Previous studies demonstrated that global warming can lead to deteriorated air quality even when anthropogenic emissions were kept constant, which has been called a climate change penalty on air quality. It is expected that anthropogenic emissions will decrease significantly in the future considering the aggressive emission control actions in China. However, the dependence of climate change penalty on the choice of emission scenario is still uncertain. To fill this gap, we conducted multiple independent model simulations to investigate the response of PM to future (2050) climate warming (RCP8.5) in China but with different emission scenarios, including the constant 2015 emissions, the 2050 CLE emissions (based on Current Legislation), and the 2050 MTFR emissions (based on Maximum Technically Feasible Reduction). For each set of emissions, we estimate climate change penalty as the difference in PM between a pair of simulations with either 2015 or 2050 meteorology. Under 2015 emissions, we find a PM climate change penalty of 1.43 μg m in Eastern China, leading to an additional 35,000 PM-related premature deaths [95% confidence interval (CI), 21,000-40,000] by 2050. However, the PM climate change penalty weakens to 0.24 μg m with strict anthropogenic emission controls under the 2050 MTFR emissions, which decreases the associated PM-related deaths to 17,000. The smaller MTFR climate change penalty contributes 14% of the total PM decrease when both emissions and meteorology are changed from 2015 to 2050, and 24% of total health benefits associated with this PM decrease in Eastern China. This finding suggests that controlling anthropogenic emissions can effectively reduce the climate change penalty on PM and its associated premature deaths, even though a climate change penalty still occurs even under MTFR. Strengthened controls on anthropogenic emissions are key to attaining air quality targets and protecting human health in the context of future global climate change.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.144338 | DOI Listing |
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