Completed Lungs & Breathing Climate, Earth & Environment

Climate, Economics and Health: Adding air quality impacts into social cost of carbon estimates

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations George Washington University · New York University · University of California, Berkeley Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.8M
Period Jul 2023 — Jun 2026

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every year, wildfires and heatwaves pump more ozone and particulate matter into the air we breathe—and current climate policy models ignore the health costs of that pollution. This matters because governments use the "social cost of carbon" to decide how aggressively to cut emissions. That figure currently accounts for damage from floods, crop losses, and heat stress, but not for the thousands of additional asthma attacks, heart attacks, and premature deaths caused by climate-driven air quality changes. Without that data, policymakers systematically undervalue the benefits of clean energy and emissions reductions. If this project succeeds, the US and German governments will for the first time include air quality health impacts in their official cost-benefit calculations for climate regulations. That could shift billions of pounds in investment toward tighter pollution controls, wildfire prevention, and ozone-reduction strategies. The team is building the specific numbers—how much a one-degree temperature rise increases wildfire smoke or ground-level ozone, and how many additional hospital visits that triggers—so that the GIVE economic model can produce a more complete social cost of carbon. The result would be policy that reflects the true health burden of every tonne of CO₂ emitted.

View original technical description
Increased exposure to outdoor air pollution is one of the primary mechanisms for adverse health impacts from climate change. It affects all regions of the world and is a strong motivation arguing for more aggressive climate mitigation efforts. However, despite its overall importance, air quality impacts are currently not included in the economic models and policy tools used to quantify the benefits of prospective climate policies. In response to the recommendations from a recent expert panel, the project team and stakeholders will carry out the necessary work to incorporate changes in air quality, and its associated health impacts, into estimates of the social cost of greenhouse used by federal policymakers in the US and Germany. The project consists of four inter-related components including: delineating which climate-related air quality impacts are suitable for inclusion into social cost of greenhouse gas estimates; quantification of the impacts of unit changes in temperature on ambient pollutant concentrations (primarily mediated through changes in wildland fire emissions and temperature impacts on ground- level ozone); determination of changes in health impacts attributable to climate-related changes in air quality; and incorporation of health impacts of air pollution into the GIVE model to estimate social cost of greenhouse gas values.

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Researchers

David Anthoff (EPMC Awardee)Kevin Cromar (EPMC Awardee)Susan Anenberg (EPMC Awardee)

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