Estimating future climate change impacts on human mortality and crop yields via air pollution
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Future climate change may bring local benefits or penalties to surface air pollution, resulting from changing temperature, precipitation, and transport patterns, as well as changes in climate-sensitive natural precursor emissions. Here, we estimate the climate penalties and benefits at the end of this century with regard to surface ozone and fine particulate matter (PM[Formula: see text]; excluding dust and smoke) using a one-way offline coupling between a general circulation model and a global 3-D chemical-transport model. We archive meteorology for the present day (2005 to 2014) and end of this century (2090 to 2099) for seven future scenarios developed for Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. The model isolates the impact of forecasted anthropogenic precursor emission changes versus that of climate-only driven changes on surface ozone and PM[Formula: see text] for scenarios ranging from extreme mitigation to extreme warming. We then relate these changes to impacts on human mortality and crop production. We find ozone penalties over nearly all land areas with increasing warming. We find net benefits due to climate-driven changes in PM[Formula: see text] in the Northern Extratropics, but net penalties in the Tropics and Southern Hemisphere, where most population growth is forecast for the coming century.
Language: English
Subfield: Atmospheric Science
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Awards: Collaborative Research: P2C2--Drivers for Past Variability in Tropospheric Reactive Halogens: Implications for Climate and Evaluation of Ice Core Proxies, Collaborative Research: P2C2--Interrogating the Free Troposphere during the Last Deglaciation, Environmental Agents as Modulators of Disease Processes
OpenAlex ID: W4402581911