World’s degrading air quality under a business-as-usual scenario
A paper co-authored by JRC researchers and recently published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics demonstrates the extent to which global air quality will deteriorate by 2050 if man-made emissions remain at current levels and air quality legislation is not reinforced. According to the paper, Effects of business-as-usual anthropogenic emissions on air quality, the air quality experienced by the average global citizen in 2050 would be almost as poor as that experienced by the average citizen in East Asia today.
Scientists from the JRC contributed to the paper by providing emissions information for a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario, which assumed that no additional climate and air pollutant mitigation policies beyond those implemented in 2005 would be put into place. In the scenario, population and economic growth were considered as the determining factors for energy and food consumption and therefore air pollution sources. This emissions information was used in the Max Planck Institute’s EMAC global chemistry/climate model to analyse the impact of such an emissions scenario on global and regional air quality.
