Clean air policies are key for successfully mitigating Arctic warming

A tighter integration of modeling frameworks for climate and air quality is urgently needed to assess the impacts of clean air policies on future Arctic and global climate. We combined a new model approach to assess climate and human health co-benefits of emissions reductions. Fossil fuel use is projected to rapidly decline in an increasingly sustainable world, resulting in far-reaching air quality benefits. Despite human health benefits, reductions in sulfur emissions in a more sustainable world could enhance Arctic warming by ∼0.8 °C in 2050 relative to the years 1995–2014, thereby offsetting climate benefits from emissions reductions. Targeted and carefully designed emission reduction opportunities exist to simultaneously alleviate climate and human health co-benefits. It would be critical to unlock a new identified mitigation potential for carbon particulate matter, yielding Arctic climate benefits equivalent to those from carbon dioxide reductions by 2050.