Atmospheric health burden across the century and the accelerating impact of temperature compared to pollution

Anthropogenic emissions alter atmospheric composition and therefore the climate, with implications for air pollution- and climate-related human health. Mortality attributable to air pollution and non-optimal temperature is a major concern, expected to shift under future climate change and socioeconomic scenarios. In this work, results from numerical simulations are used to assess future changes in mortality attributable to long-term exposure to both non-optimal temperature and air pollution simultaneously. Here we show that under a realistic scenario, end-of-century mortality could quadruple from present-day values to around 30 (95% confidence interval:15-75 million people per year). While pollution-related mortality is predicted to increase five-fold, temperature-related mortality will experience a seven-fold, making it a more important health risk factor than pollution for at least 20% of the world's population. These findings highlight the urgent need to implement stronger climatic policies to prevent further losses of life, outweighing the benefits of air quality improvements alone.

Andrea Pozzer, Brendan Steffens, Yiannis Proestos, Jean Sciare, Dimitris Akritidis, Sourangsu Chowdhury, Katrin Burkart, Sara Bacer