Future Ozone-Related Short-Term Excess Mortality Under a Changing Climate: A Multi-Location Study in 407 Cities in 20 Countries
Abstract
Climate change will further increase ground-level ozone concentrations in many areas already burdened with high pollution levels. However, previous projection studies are generally limited to long-term exposure metrics and sparse geographical scopes. Here, we estimated the future changes in excess mortality from short-term exposure to ozone in 407 cities and 20 countries. We obtained coarse-scale modeled ozone concentrations from the Aerosols and Chemistry Model Intercomparison Project (AerChemMIP) as well as historical ambient ozone observations, population change projections, and baseline mortality rates for 407 cities in 20 countries from the Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network. We first performed a spatial-downscaling and bias-correction of the coarse-scale modeled ozone concentrations from five global chemistry-climate models (CESM2, EC-Earth3-AerChem, GFDL-ESM4, MPI-ESM-1-2-Ham, and UKESM-1-0-LL) to a fine-scale spatial resolution (0.25° x 0.25°). We applied this correction to daily projections of ground-level ozone from the newly developed Shared Socio-economic Pathways 3-7.0, a scenario without climate change mitigation and with only weak air pollution control, for present (2010-2014) and future (2050-2054) periods. We then estimated present and future ozone-related excess mortality using country-specific ozone-mortality relationships from Vicedo-Cabrera et al. (2019) for ozone concentrations above maximum background levels (70 μg/m3) and corresponding SSP population projections. Under the SSP3-7.0 scenario, we estimate that the fraction of total deaths that is attributed to short-term ozone exposure will increase from 0.17% to 0.21% (6,200 additional deaths per year) between the present period (2010-2014) and future period (2050-2054), with rising mortality projected in the vast majority (94%) of studied cities. These findings suggest the importance of air quality and climate interventions to address the growing ozone-related health burden.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMGH25A..05C