Download How do regional aerosol emissions affect climate?

Assessing multiple environmental impacts
of pollutant emissions: the global picture
(*see related Grantham policy note published today*)
by Apostolos Voulgarakis,
Department of Physics, Imperial College London
Imperial Earth Day, 21st of April 2017
Acknowledgements: Peter Steiglechner1,2, Mathew Kasoar1, Alyssa Gilbert1,
Dilshad Shawki1, Laura Mansfield1,3
(+thanks to the Met Office for computing resources)
1Imperial
College London, UK, 2FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, 3University of Reading, UK
The pollution-climate complex:
Source: US Climate Change Science Program.
Pollutants of relevance for global climate policy
Key species: Sulphate (SO4) & Black Carbon (BC)
IPCC 2013
Emission metrics
• Climate policy makers use metrics to evaluate and compare
pollutants in terms of their impacts on global warming.
• Traditional metrics include the global warming potential (GWP),
which is the only metric used in the Kyoto Protocol.
IPCC 2013
Motivation
• Need metrics that go beyond just warming, capturing
multiple environmental impacts of air pollutant emissions,
such as on rainfall and air quality, as well as on temperature.
• Need metrics that can provide information on both global
and regional environmental impacts of emissions from specific
locations of the globe.
• Global air pollution-climate modelling experiments have
recently been performed at Imperial College for the first time
and will help achieve these aims.
Global impacts of regional emissions
(See Grantham briefing note)
Regional
impacts
(European
SO2)
(See Grantham briefing note)
Regional
impacts
(European
BC)
(See Grantham briefing note)
Future challenges
 Include more pollutants in this framework.
 Include impacts on air quality/climate extremes.
 Calculate metrics based on emissions by economic activity
sector instead of by species.
 Calculate such metrics with more models.
 Construct a unified metric that captures all impacts
simultaneously.