Local air pollution and global climate change. A combined cost-benefit analysis.
By J. Bollen, Bob van der Zwaan, C. Brink, H. Eerens. 2009
187 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article presents the findings of a combined cost-benefit analysis of local air pollution and global climate change, two subjects that are usually studied separately. Yet these distinct environmental problems are closely related, since they are both driven by the nature of present energy production and consumption patterns. Our study demonstrates the mutual relevance of, and interaction between, policies designed to address these two environmental challenges individually. Given the many dimensions air pollution control and climate change management have in common, it is surprising that they have only little been analyzed in combination so far. We attempt to cover at least part of the existing gap in the literature by assessing how costs and benefits of technologies and strategies that jointly tackle these two environmental problems can best be balanced. By using specific technological options that cut down local air pollution, e.g. related to particulate emissions, one may concurrently reduce CO2 emissions and thus contribute to diminishing global climate change. Inversely, some of the long-term climate change strategies simultaneously improve the quality of air in the short run. We have extended the well-established MERGE model by including emissions of particulate matter, and show that integrated environmental policies generate net global welfare benefits. We also demonstrate that the discounted benefits of local air pollution reduction significantly outweigh those of global climate change mitigation, at least by a factor of 2, but in most cases of our sensitivity analysis much more. Still, we do not argue to only restrict energy policy today to what should be our first priority, local air pollution control, and wait with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we propose to design policies that simultaneously address these issues, as their combination creates an additional climate change bonus. As such, climate change mitigation proves an ancillary benefit of air pollution reduction, rather than the other way around.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1297b8fc9ae17a7851f8a6d591f67fabfdc1a8db
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Citations in the corpus
- Air pollution policy in Europe: Quantifying the interaction with greenhouse gases and climate change policies (2014, background): “This aggregate serves as a rough indicator for the change in health impact in the EU resulting from the reduction in emissions of air pollutants (see OECD, 2012).”
- Synergy between pollution and carbon emissions control: Comparing China and the United States (2014, background): “However, cross-country comparisons of this kind suffer from differences in measures of co-benefits and methods to evaluate them, often considering different sets of air pollutants and GHGs (Bollen et al., 2009a).”
- An integrated assessment of climate change, air pollution, and energy security policy. (2010, background): “For our purposes we expanded MERGE with expressions that quantify damages incurred to regional economies as a result of air pollution (Bollen et al., 2009) and lack of energy security (the present paper).”
- Evaluating the effectiveness of urban energy conservation and GHG mitigation measures: The case of Xiamen city, China (2010, background): “Bollen performed an integrated assessment of the long-term conundrum of climate-change mitigation and the short-term challenge of reducing local air pollution using the MERGE model (Bollen et al., 2009).”
- Implications of incorporating air-quality co-benefits into climate change policymaking (2010, background): “Bollen et al (2009) adapt a version of model B above to perform a cost-benefit analysis that includes both climatic and AQ impacts; they find the AQ co-benefits twice as large as climatic benefits.”