Updated PM2.5 Mortality Estimates for Europe in Coming Decades via the CATALYSE Project

The EU’s CATALYSE project (Climate Action to Advance Healthy Societies in Europe) aims to close the knowledge-to-action gap concerning environmental hazards linked to climate change and their effects on human health in Europe. In doing so, CATALYSE will fortify the science-to-policy interface by providing actionable policy scenarios for Europe for the coming decades. Four such policy scenarios for Europe (spanning 2020 to 2050) have been developed under CATALYSE, each with differing assumptions concerning energy use, agricultural practices, and air quality controls and policies: [1] a business-as-usual Reference Scenario, [2] a Green Deal Scenario, which incorporates the climate targets of the EU's Green Deal, [3] a Beyond Green Deal Scenario, which adds behavioural change policies associated with buildings, transport, and food sectors, and [4] a Beyond Green Deal - 90% Optimization Scenario, which adds enhanced end-of-pipe air pollution control measures. Each of the four scenarios results in differing PM_2.5 -precursor emissions between 2020 and 2050.

 

We have implemented the emissions output from the four CATALYSE scenarios as input in the EMAC atmospheric model (Jöckel et al. 2006), simulating the years 2020, 2030, 2040, and 2050, in order to evaluate each scenario’s impact on PM_2.5 concentrations in Europe specifically. We estimate the European mortality burden from these PM_2.5 concentrations in each scenario across the coming decades using a suite of exposure response functions. With the FUSION global exposure response function (Burnett et al. 2022), we find that compared to the Reference scenario, annual mortality due to PM_2.5  in Europe in the Green Deal scenario is reduced by more than 20,000 deaths in 2030, 30,000 deaths in 2040, and almost 40,000 deaths in 2050. In the more ambitious policy scenarios, those numbers are enhanced by up to a factor of two. Using the European ELAPSE exposure response function (Strak et a. 2021), the Green Deal scenario saves over 50,000, 80,000, and 90,000 lives in 2030, 2040, and 2050, respectively, with the more ambitious policy scenarios once again enhancing those numbers by up to a factor of two.

 

We conclude that even modest, realistic pollution-mitigation approaches in Europe can significantly reduce the mortality burden due to PM_2.5 in the coming decades.