Globally, costs of the Paris Climate Agreement could be outweighed by health savings from reducing air pollution
“Globally, costs of the Paris Climate Agreement could be outweighed by health savings from reducing air pollution”
“Researchers from BC3 (Basque Center for Climate Change) have led this international study sponsored by the European Horizon 2020 program.”
Globally, the costs of implementing the Paris Climate Agreement between 2020-2050 could be outweighed by health savings due to reduced air pollution-related disease and death, according to estimates from a modelling study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal.
195 countries are currently signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement, which is due to commence in 2020. It aims to reduce the impacts of climate change by preventing the global average temperature from increasing to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with a view to further limit this to less than 1.5°C. However, how these targets will be achieved and funded by all countries has not yet been agreed.
“We hope that the large health co-benefits we have estimated for different scenarios and countries might help policymakers move towards adopting more ambitious climate policies and measures to reduce air pollution, and to consider how to share the burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution-related disease,”
says Professor Anil Markandya, Basque Centre for Climate Change, Spain.
In the study, the authors combined a number of existing models to estimate emission levels, air pollution-related deaths (as a result of respiratory disease, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, lung cancer, and acute lower respiratory airway infections) and their costs, costs of climate change mitigation, and healthcare co-benefits [2] for the US, EU-27, China, India, and the rest of the world.