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.

Knut von Salzen, Cynthia H. Whaley, Susan C. Anenberg, Rita Van Dingenen, Zbigniew Klimont, Mark G. Flanner, Rashed Mahmood, Stephen R. Arnold, Stephen Beagley, Rong-You Chien, Jesper H. Christensen, Sabine Eckhardt, Annica M. L. Ekman, Nikolaos Evangelou, Greg Faluvegi, Joshua S. Fu, Michael Gauss, Wanmin Gong, Jens L. Hjorth, Ulas Im, Srinath Krishnan, Kaarle Kupiainen, Thomas Kühn, Joakim Langner, Kathy S. Law, Louis Marelle, Dirk Olivié, Tatsuo Oshima, Ville-Veikko Paunu, Yiran Peng, David Plummer, Luca Pozzoli, Shilpa Rao, Jean-Christophe Raut, Maria Sand, Julia Schmale, Michael Sigmond, Manu A. Thomas, Kostas Tsigaridis, Svetlana Tsyro, Steven T. Turnock, Minqi Wang, Barbara Winter