Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Mitigation policy

Health co-benefits

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 863–864 (2013)Cite this article

Subjects

Efforts to tackle climate change have met significant financial and political barriers that have been difficult to overcome. Research now shows that such measures are justified on grounds other than mitigation of climate change.

One thing that we all share is the air we breathe: the wealthier among us can carry bottled water and eat organically grown food, but we all still need to breathe ambient air if we want to move around our planet. Air is essential for human life and crosses national boundaries but, because of air pollution, it is also one of the leading causes of death globally. Indeed, the most recent Global Burden of Disease report1 found that air pollution causes millions of deaths around the world annually, with 1.2 million deaths per year in China alone2,3. And these estimates ignore hospital admissions, doctors' visits, lost workdays, asthma attacks and all other adverse health effects due to ambient air pollution, with high costs to society. So what has this to do with climate change? Writing in Nature Climate Change, West et al.4 provide an answer to this key question with a transformative 'Rosetta Stone'-like analysis that for the first time allows the translation of climate change mitigation measures into their associated air-pollution-related human health benefits on both regional and global scales. They find that global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation measures would avoid 0.5±0.2 and 1.3±0.5 million premature deaths in 2030 and 2050, respectively, and that the monetized value of these clean-air health co-benefits would exceed marginal costs of abatement in those years. These results therefore provide a strong rationale for immediate action to reduce air pollution from fossil fuels to mitigate climate change.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: The health and associated economic benefits of climate change mitigation in 20304.

References

  1. Lim, S. et al. Lancet 380, 2224–2260 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Yang, G. et al. Lancet 381, 1987–2015 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Wong, E. Early Deaths Linked to China's Air Pollution Totaled 1.2 Million in 2010, Data Shows. New York Times (2 April 2013); http://go.nature.com/1kr8UJ

  4. West, J. J. et al. Nature Clim. Change 3, 885–889 (2013).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Public Policy Position: Energy (American Lung Association, 2012); http://go.nature.com/Np9vfW

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. George D. Thurston is in the Department of Environmental Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue New York, New York 10016, USA,

    George D. Thurston

Authors
  1. George D. Thurston
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to George D. Thurston.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Thurston, G. Health co-benefits. Nature Clim Change 3, 863–864 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2013

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2013

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing