Ponente
Descripción
The impacts of climate change on air quality — and thus on human and ecosystem health — act through multiple pathways. The drivers of these impacts are primarily higher temperatures (influencing chemical reaction rates), but also changes in other meteorological factors such as clouds (influencing photochemistry), precipitation (influencing deposition), and winds (influencing pollutant dispersion). Other Earth system feedbacks caused by climate change that affect atmospheric pollutant loads directly have already been observed (e.g., increased forest fires, sand and dust storms, biogenic emissions from land and oceans, and the release of methane from thawing permafrost).
This contribution provides a brief review of these drivers, highlights their complexity, and discusses promising approaches that can help to unravel and attribute causes. Concrete examples are provided by the evaluation of past trends in stratosphere-troposphere exchange of ozone using chemistry-climate models and the influence of meteorology on air pollutant concentrations during the Covid lockdown using a machine-learning approach. The implications of this complexity between climate change and air quality for future mitigation policies will conclude the discussion.
