Air quality and health impacts of co-created climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies

Over the next decades, the effects of climate change are expected to worsen, posing greater risks to human health. Integrated mitigation and adaption strategies are urgent and should involve local and regional authorities at different levels where their expertise can make a difference. Moreover, developing and implementing tools and initiatives with the collaboration of citizens, researchers, and policymakers on specific climate change adaptation and mitigation measures would increase their ability to respond, and reduce their overall risk and vulnerability.

The ongoing DISTENDER Horizon Europe project aims to assess the effectiveness and robustness of different adaptation and mitigation measures by the development of a set of cross-sectoral and multi-scale modelling tools for impact assessment and economic evaluation framework that will feed a Decision Support System (DSS) to support decision making towards climate resilience. The DSS will include a tool that allows policy-makers to rank strategies, which have been previously assessed against a set of cross-sectorial climate change related indicators. This work will focus on the emissions, air quality and health related indicators (2 out of 14) that have been evaluated for the modellable strategies over a wide range of 330 strategies, for different European case studies, covering different sectors (agriculture, energy, transport and mobility, etc). The strategies were based on existing or new regional or local policies and challenges, and on the co-design by stakeholders in co-creation workshops, and were assessed by a modelling approach from emissions to health impacts and trade-offs for the future.

The methodology to evaluate the strategies, after a preliminary screening to identify which could be modelled, consisted of different steps, starting by the interpretation of each strategy and translation into a quantifiable effect on emissions, followed by its air quality and health simulation. The outputs were expressed as a percentage reduction or increase of health effects compared to the reference, that allowed to score the strategies from 1 (high increase) to 5 (high reduction) where 3 means no effect.

The results indicated that none of the strategies would lead to negative effects on health which was expected since most of them were mobility measures designed to reduce air pollution. The highest positive impacts were found for mobility strategies related to the drastic reduction of private cars and promotion of carbon neutral public transportation in urban areas. These outcomes will be part of the decision matrix of 14 indicators to be included in the DSS and help policy makers to select more efficiently the most adequate, robust and cost-benefit mitigation and adaption measures to tackle climate change risks in their regions.