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Effects of global climate mitigation on regional air quality and health

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 1054–1066 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate mitigation can bring air quality and health co-benefits. How these health impacts might be distributed across countries remains unclear. Here we use a coupled climate–energy–health model to assess the country-varying health effects of a global carbon price across nearly 30,000 future states of the world (SOWs). As a carbon price lowers fossil fuel use, our analysis suggests consistent reductions in ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) levels and associated mortality risks in countries that currently suffer most from air pollution. For a few less-polluted countries, however, a carbon price can increase the mortality risks under some of the considered SOWs due to emissions increases from bioenergy use and land-use changes. These potential health co-harms are largely driven in our model by the scale and method of deforestation. A robust and quantitative understanding of these distributional outcomes requires improved representations of relevant deep uncertainties, country-specific characteristics and cross-sector interactions.

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Fig. 1: Pathways for a global carbon price to influence climate, health and equity outcomes.
Fig. 2: Impacts of a global carbon price on future global average temperature and regional distribution of PM2.5-attributable death rates.
Fig. 3: Distribution of PM2.5-attributable death rates across regions in 2050.
Fig. 4: Regional changes in the health drivers, exposures and risks in response to the considered global carbon price in 2050.
Fig. 5: Regional changes in land use, OC emissions and health risks as a result of the considered global carbon price in 2050.

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Data availability

The dataset generated during and analysed in the current study is available from a public Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6975580). All input data are available in the repository. The output of the GCAM ensemble is not available due to limited space, but the required outputs for the analysis and the production of the tables and the figures in this study are available in the repository.

Code availability

The GCAM model is available for download from https://github.com/JGCRI/gcam-core. Detailed model documentation is available online at http://jgcri.github.io/gcam-doc/index.html. The TM5-FASST model is available at http://tm5-fasst.jrc.ec.europa.eu/. Python (v3.6) and R(v3.6) are used for data analysis. The codes we use to process the data, calculate the health impacts and make the plots are available from a public Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7894050).

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Acknowledgements

X.H., V.S. and W.P. acknowledge the support from the National Science Foundation under grant number 2125293. We also thank the seed grant support from Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. K.K.’s contribution was supported by Dartmouth College. We thank E. Mayfield, L. Lynd, S. Wishbone and J. Shiwang for invaluable inputs. All errors and opinions are those of the authors and not of the funding entities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Xinyuan Huang & Wei Peng

  2. Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Vivek Srikrishnan

  3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Jonathan Lamontagne

  4. Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Klaus Keller

  5. School of International Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Wei Peng

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Contributions

X.H., V.S., K.K. and W.P. designed the study and interpreted the data. V.S. and J.L. constructed the state of the world ensemble. X.H. led the data analysis and produced the figures. All authors co-wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Wei Peng.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Govinda R. Timilsina and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Huang, X., Srikrishnan, V., Lamontagne, J. et al. Effects of global climate mitigation on regional air quality and health. Nat Sustain 6, 1054–1066 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01133-5

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