Identification

Title

The co-benefits of a low-carbon future for PM

Abstract

There is considerable academic interest in the potential for air quality improvement as a co-benefit of climate change mitigation. Few studies use regional air quality models for simulating future co-benefits, but many use global chemistry–climate model output. Using regional atmospheric chemistry could provide a better representation of air quality changes than global chemistry–climate models, especially by improving the representation of elevated urban concentrations. We use a detailed regional atmospheric-chemistry model (WRF-Chem v4.2) to model European air quality in 2050 compared to 2014 following three climate change mitigation scenarios. We represent different climate futures by using air pollutant emissions and chemical boundary conditions (from CESM2-WACCM output) for three shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0: high-, medium- and low-mitigation pathways respectively). We find that in 2050, following SSP1-2.6, mean population-weighted PM2.5 concentrations across European countries are reduced by 52 % compared to 2014. Under SSP2-4.5, this average reduction is 34%. The smallest average reduction is 18 %, achieved following SSP3-7.0. Maximum 6-monthly-mean daily-maximum 8 h (6mDM8h) ozone (O3) is reduced across Europe by 15 % following SSP1-2.6 and by 3 % following SSP2-4.5, but it increases by 13 % following SSP3-7.0. This demonstrates clear co-benefits of climate mitigation. The additional resolution allows us to analyse regional differences and identify key sectors. We find that the mitigation of agricultural emissions will be key for attaining meaningful co-benefits of mitigation policies, as evidenced by the importance of changes in NO3 aerosol mass to future PM2.5 air quality and changes in CH4 emissions to future O3 air quality.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7ff3xqc

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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Temporal reference

Temporal extent

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Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2024-09-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

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Use constraints

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact