Atmospheric health burden across the century and the accelerating impact of temperature compared to pollution

Abstract

Anthropogenic emissions alter atmospheric composition and therefore the climate, with implications for air pollution- and climate-related human health. Mortality attributable to air pollution and non-optimal temperature is a major concern, expected to shift under future climate change and socioeconomic scenarios. In this work, results from numerical simulations are used to assess future changes in mortality attributable to long-term exposure to both non-optimal temperature and air pollution simultaneously. Here we show that under a realistic scenario, end-of-century mortality could quadruple from present-day values to around 30 (95% confidence level:12-53) million people/year. While pollution-related mortality is projected to increase five-fold, temperature-related mortality will experience a seven-fold rise, making it a more important health risk factor than air pollution for at least 20% of the world's population. These findings highlight the urgent need to implement stronger climate policies to prevent future loss of life, outweighing the benefits of air quality improvements alone.

Fig. 1. Spatial distribution of the annual mortality.

Mortality attributable to long-term exposure to non-optimal temperature (a) and to air pollution (c) at the beginning of the century. The differences for the same results by the end of the century in the Shared Socio-economic Pathways SSP2-4.5 scenario are presented (b) and (d).

Fig. 2. Changes in the period 2000–2090 for the Shared Socio-economic Pathways scenarios SSP1-2.6 (dotted curves), SSP2-4.5 (solid curves) and SSP5-8.5 (dashed curves).

a Global mortality attributable to non-optimal temperature (red) and to air pollution (blue). b Global population weighted exposure to non-optimal temperature (red, right vertical axis) and air pollution (PM_2.5, blue, left vertical axis). c Global population. d Global population average age.