A tool for air pollution scenarios (TAPS v1.0) to enable global, long-term, and flexible study of climate and air quality policies

Abstract

Abstract. Air pollution is a major sustainability challenge – and future anthropogenic precursor and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will greatly affect human well-being. While mitigating climate change can reduce air pollution both directly and indirectly, distinct policy levers can affect these two interconnected sustainability issues across a wide range of scenarios. We help to assess such issues by presenting a public Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS) that can flexibly assess pollutant emissions from a variety of climate and air quality actions, through the tool's coupling with socioeconomic modeling of climate change mitigation. In this study, we develop and implement TAPS with three components: recent global and fuel-specific anthropogenic emissions inventories, scenarios of emitting activities to 2100 from the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, and emissions intensity trends based on recent scenario data from the Greenhouse Gas–Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model. An initial application shows that in scenarios with less climate and pollution policy ambition, near-term air quality improvements from existing policies are eclipsed by long-term emissions increases – particularly from industrial processes that combine sharp production growth with less stringent pollution controls in developing regions. Additional climate actions would substantially reduce air pollutant emissions related to fossil fuel (such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides), while further pollution controls would lead to larger reductions for ammonia and organic carbon (OC). Future applications of TAPS could explore diverse regional and global policies that affect these emissions, using pollutant emissions results to drive global atmospheric chemical transport models to study the scenarios' health impacts.

A Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS v1.0) to enable global, long-term, and flexible study of climate and air quality policies

“…Code and data availability. A (frozen) version of the tool code, processing scripts, data outputs, figure production, and any inputs not described below can be found on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7158380 (Atkinson et al, 2022).…”

Rapid Estimation of Climate–Air Quality Interactions in Integrated Assessment Using a Response Surface Model

“…We use GCHP to simulate global air quality in the 2090s with year-2014 anthropogenic emissions of NO x , SO x , VOCs, and ammonia. Year-2014 emission data are used to provide a known baseline distribution and magnitude of emissions, but subsequent studies might consider using projections based on plausible scenarios of future emission changes . The simulation is repeated four additional times, with a 10% reduction in global emissions of each pollutant (i.e., five simulations total).…”

“…Year-2014 emission data are used to provide a known baseline distribution and magnitude of emissions, but subsequent studies might consider using projections based on plausible scenarios of future emission changes. 39 The simulation is repeated four additional times, with a 10% reduction in global emissions of each pollutant (i.e., five simulations total). This exercise is performed for two different climate projections, consistent with a 2080−2100 mean warming (relative to 1990−2009) of either 1.1 or 4.3 °C.…”

The Multi-Compartment Hg Modeling and Analysis Project (MCHgMAP): Mercury modeling to support international environmental policy

“…It is recommended that the new modeling assessment of the future emission scenarios be conducted starting projections from 2015 emission inventories, the most recent year of currently reported anthropogenic emissions. Presently, two such efforts are ongoing that are aimed at producing up-to-date future global Hg emission scenarios, summarized in Table E11: policies, using the most up-to-date emission factors (Atkinson et al, 2022). It can efficiently assess a wide range of climate and air quality policy pathwaysfrom broad to specific at the regional, sectoral, and fuel-based levels.…”

“…Spatially gridded emissions outputs can be used as input variables in chemical transport models (CTMs). The Hg extension in TAPS will calculate Hg emission projections by combining the EDGAR Hg inventory, EPPA climate policy scenarios, and time-dependent Hg emission factors derived from different future Hg emission scenarios (Atkinson et al, 2022;Chen et al, 2022).…”