Global Climate and Human Health Effects of the Gasoline and Diesel Vehicle Fleets

Abstract

The global gasoline and diesel fuel vehicle fleets impose substantial impacts on air quality, human health, and climate change. Here we quantify the global radiative forcing and human health impacts of the global gasoline and diesel sectors using the NCAR CESM global chemistry‐climate model for year 2015 emissions from the IIASA GAINS inventory. Net global radiative effects of short‐lived climate forcers (including aerosols, ozone, and methane) from the gasoline and diesel sectors are +13.6 and +9.4 mW m−2, respectively. The annual mean net aerosol contributions to the net radiative effects of gasoline and diesel are −9.6 ± 2.0 and +8.8 ± 5.8 mW m−2. Aerosol indirect effects for the gasoline and diesel road vehicle sectors are −16.6 ± 2.1 and −40.6 ± 4.0 mW m−2. The fractional contributions of short‐lived climate forcers to the total global climate impact including carbon dioxide on the 20‐year time scale are similar, 14.9% and 14.4% for gasoline and diesel, respectively. Global annual total PM2.5‐ and ozone‐induced premature deaths for gasoline and diesel sectors approach 115,000 (95% CI: 69,000–153,600) and 122,100 (95% CI: 78,500–157,500), with corresponding years of life lost of 2.10 (95% CI: 1.23–2.66) and 2.21 (95% CI: 1.47–2.85) million years. Substantial regional variability of premature death rates is found for the diesel sector when the regional health effects are normalized by the annual total regional vehicle distance traveled. Regional premature death rates for the gasoline and diesel sectors, respectively, vary by a factor of eight and two orders of magnitude, with India showing the highest for both gasoline and diesel sectors.

Impacts of Global Solid Biofuel Stove Emissions on Ambient Air Quality and Human Health

“…This is consistent with previous studies using GEMM (Burnett et al, 2018;Lelieveld et al, 2019). The annual total premature deaths of NCD + LRI attributable to long-term PM 2.5 exposure for the year 2010 in this study are over a factor of 2 higher than the previous studies using the integrated exposure-response (IER) functions developed in GBD for the estimates of five causes of deaths, which are lower respiratory infection, stroke, ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, and COPD (Anenberg et al, 2017b;Huang et al, 2020;Lelieveld et al, 2015). China and India collectively account for about 50% of the total global annual PM 2.5 -induced and O 3 -induced premature deaths.…”

“…We follow Turner et al (2016) and Huang et al (2020) to account for O 3 -induced chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD), which shows that HR increases by 14% (95CI: 8-21%) per 10 ppbv increase in annual mean daily maximum 8-h (MDA8) O 3 concentrations. For each grid cell (i, j), HR associated with O 3 -induced COPD exposure is shown in Equation 2.…”

“…This suggests that secondary organic and inorganic contributions to total PM 2.5 concentrations from solid biofuel stove emissions in these areas are less important than the primary carbonaceous sources. This is primarily driven by the low emissions of NO x , SO 2 , and NH 3 associated with the global solid biofuel stove sector (Table 1), resulting in lower levels of oxidants and secondary aerosols, compared with other anthropogenic emission sectors, such as energy, industry, agriculture, and transportation (Huang et al, 2018(Huang et al, , 2020.…”

“…NMVOCs, NO x , and CO are important ozone (O 3 ) precursors (Huang et al, 2017), and NMVOCs, NO x , SO 2 , and NH 3 are precursors of secondary organic and inorganic aerosols (Huang et al, 2020). Solid biofuel stoves also emit long-lived greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide and methane (Anenberg et al, 2017a).…”

Influence of Motorization Development on Civilization Diseases

“…Based on Yaoxian Huang's data, it can be stated that global annual total PM2.5-and ozone-induced premature deaths for gasoline and diesel sectors approach 115 000 and 122 100 with corresponding years of lives lost of 2.10 and 2.21 million years. A substantial regional variability of premature death rates is found for the diesel sector when the regional health effects are normalized by the annual total regional vehicle distance travelled [22].…”