A tool for air pollution scenarios (TAPS v1.0) to enable global, long-term, and flexible study of climate and air quality policies
Name
gmd-15-7767-2022.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.86 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5a4600646a806d7f90e0f18cabefcd1f
Author(s)
Atkinson, William
Eastham, Sebastian D
Chen, Y-H Henry
Morris, Jennifer
Paltsev, Sergey
Schlosser, C Adam
Selin, Noelle E
Date Issued
October 21, 2022
Journal
Geoscientific Model Development
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Citation
Atkinson, W., Eastham, S. D., Chen, Y.-H. H., Morris, J., Paltsev, S., Schlosser, C. A., and Selin, N. E.: A tool for air pollution scenarios (TAPS v1.0) to enable global, long-term, and flexible study of climate and air quality policies, Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 7767–7789.
Version
Final published version
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-7767-2022
