Health co-benefits of climate change mitigation depend on strategic power plant retirements
Abstract
Polices aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel- and biomass-fired power plants often also reduce emissions of air pollution, thereby benefitting both global climate and public health. Although the aggregate health co-benefits of energy transitions have been previously estimated, here we develop a model that resolves individual electricity generating units worldwide to examine the relationship of climate and health benefits in much greater detail across a range of climate and energy policy scenarios. Of the 861,254 PM2.5-related deaths (95% CI: 811,594-910,476) that we estimate were related to fossil-fuel- and biomass-fired power plants in 2010, roughly 90% occurred in low-income or emerging economies such as China, India, and countries in Southeast Asia (37%, 34%, and 4%, respectively). Both the overall number of deaths and the share related to power plants occurring in those economies grow in many future scenarios—even those which ultimately achieve ambitious climate targets. For example, in some of our projections that successfully avoid 1.5°C of warming (i.e. RCP1.9), the number of PM2.5-related deaths worldwide nonetheless grow to 1.53 million in 2030 before decreasing to 2010-levels (~770,000) again by mid-century. Minimizing air pollution deaths thus depends not only on global or regional climate targets, but also on strategic retirements of super-polluting power plants and the deployment of pollution control technologies. Our findings thus underscore the importance of considering public health implications in designing and implementing climate-energy policies: improved air quality and avoided air pollution deaths are not an automatic and fixed co-benefit of all climate mitigation.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMGC094..01T
- Keywords:
-
- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 3355 Regional modeling;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6339 System design;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES