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Soot and short-lived pollutants provide political opportunity

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 796–798 (2015)Cite this article

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Cutting levels of soot and other short-lived pollutants delivers tangible benefits and helps governments to build confidence that collective action on climate change is feasible. After the Paris climate meeting this December, actually reducing these pollutants will be essential to the credibility of the diplomatic process.

Over the past two decades there has been an increasing amount of scientific research showing that a reduction in black carbon (BC, also known as soot), tropospheric ozone, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) can slow near-term climate change significantly more than previously thought1. All of these compounds are short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) that persist in the atmosphere for days to a decade and a half — as opposed to CO2 and other long-lived gases with atmospheric lifetimes of hundreds to thousands of years, which have historically dominated scientific and political attention on climate change.

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Figure 1: Avoided sea-level rise at 2100 due to aggressive mitigation of long-lived CO2 and short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0519, La Jolla, California 92093-0519, USA and the Global Agenda Council on Governance for Sustainable Development, World Economic Forum, 91-93 route de la Capite, CH-1223 Cologny/Geneva, Switzerland,

    David G. Victor

  2. Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, 2300 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, 20007, Washington DC, USA

    Durwood Zaelke

  3. Center for Clouds, Chemistry & Climate Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, 9500 Gilman Drive #0221, San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0221, California, USA

    Veerabhadran Ramanathan

Authors
  1. David G. Victor
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  2. Durwood Zaelke
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  3. Veerabhadran Ramanathan
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Correspondence to David G. Victor or Veerabhadran Ramanathan.

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Victor, D., Zaelke, D. & Ramanathan, V. Soot and short-lived pollutants provide political opportunity. Nature Clim Change 5, 796–798 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2703

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