Geographically resolved social cost of anthropogenic emissions accounting for both direct and climate-mediated effects

Jennifer Burney; Geeta Persad; Jonathan Proctor; Eran Bendavid; Marshall Burke; Sam Heft-Neal

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abn7307

Geographically resolved social cost of anthropogenic emissions accounting for both direct and climate-mediated effects

Sci Adv. 2022 Sep 23;8(38):eabn7307. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abn7307. Epub 2022 Sep 23.

Authors

Jennifer Burney¹, Geeta Persad², Jonathan Proctor³, Eran Bendavid⁴, Marshall Burke⁵, Sam Heft-Neal⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
² Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
³ Center for the Environment and Data Science Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁴ Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁵ Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁶ Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Abstract

The magnitude and distribution of physical and societal impacts from long-lived greenhouse gases are insensitive to the emission source location; the same is not true for major coemitted short-lived pollutants such as aerosols. Here, we combine novel global climate model simulations with established response functions to show that a given aerosol emission from different regions produces divergent air quality and climate changes and associated human system impacts, both locally and globally. The marginal global damages to infant mortality, crop productivity, and economic growth from aerosol emissions and their climate effects differ by more than an order of magnitude depending on source region, with certain regions creating global external climate changes and impacts much larger than those felt locally. The complex distributions of aerosol-driven societal impacts emerge from geographically distinct and region-specific aerosol-climate interactions, estimation of which is enabled by the full Earth System Modeling Framework used here.