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Climate policy for short- and long-lived pollutants

The current focus on the long-term global warming potential in climate policy-making runs the risk of mitigation options for short-lived climate pollutants being ignored, and tipping points being crossed. We outline how a more balanced perspective on long- and short-lived climate pollutants could become politically feasible.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of life-cycle emissions of alternative fuels.
Fig. 2: Global GHG and BC emissionsby sector and country.

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The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

L.P.F. acknowledges financial support from the EU ERC (grant no. 295456).

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Correspondence to Lukas P. Fesenfeld.

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Fesenfeld, L.P., Schmidt, T.S. & Schrode, A. Climate policy for short- and long-lived pollutants. Nature Clim Change 8, 933–936 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0328-1

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