Curbing Short-Lived Pollutants: a Win-Win for Climate and Air Quality

Ozone, methane and aerosols (tiny pollutant particles) remain in the atmosphere for a shorter time than CO2, but can affect both the climate and air quality.  Yet environmental policies tend to separate the two issues, with measures that fight air pollution not always bringing climate benefits and vice-versa.  A new study looking into short-lived pollutants reveals measures governments could implement to substantially improve air quality as well as fight climate change.  The results, by a team of scientists from around Europe and China, are published today (24 September) in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

In the EU, the reduction in life expectancy due to air pollution was 7.5 months in 2010, and legislation already in place to improve air quality aims to reduce this loss to 5.2 months by 2030.  The team says the new measures targeting short-lived pollutants could boost air quality and reduce loss of life expectancy even further:  by a month in Europe, about two months in China and one year in India.

The new mitigation measures would also bring climate benefits, reducing global temperatures by about 0.22°C by 2050, relative to a scenario without these measures.  The reduced warming in the Arctic would be even larger, close to half a degree, while in Southern Europe the measures would not only reduce temperatures but also increase rainfall by about 15 mm/year, or about 4% of the total precipitation.  "This could help to alleviate expected future drought and water shortages in the Mediterranean region," says lead-author Andreas Stohl from the Norwegian Institute of Air Research.

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