1. Air quality co-benefits from climate mitigation for human health in South Korea.
- Author
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Kim SE, Xie Y, Dai H, Fujimori S, Hijioka Y, Honda Y, Hashizume M, Masui T, Hasegawa T, Xu X, Yi K, and Kim H
- Subjects
- Humans, Particulate Matter, Republic of Korea, Air Pollutants toxicity, Air Pollution, Climate Change, Environmental Health
- Abstract
Climate change mitigation efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have associated costs, but there are also potential benefits from improved air quality, such as public health improvements and the associated cost savings. A multidisciplinary modeling approach can better assess the co-benefits from climate mitigation for human health and provide a justifiable basis for establishment of adequate climate change mitigation policies and public health actions. An integrated research framework was adopted by combining a computable general equilibrium model, an air quality model, and a health impact assessment model, to explore the long-term economic impacts of climate change mitigation in South Korea through 2050. Mitigation costs were further compared with health-related economic benefits under different socioeconomic and climate change mitigation scenarios. Achieving ambitious targets (i.e., stabilization of the radiative forcing level at 3.4 W/m
2 ) would cost 1.3-8.5 billion USD in 2050, depending on varying carbon prices from different integrated assessment models. By contrast, achieving these same targets would reduce costs by 23 billion USD from the valuation of avoided premature mortality, 0.14 billion USD from health expenditures, and 0.38 billion USD from reduced lost work hours, demonstrating that health benefits alone noticeably offset the costs of cutting GHG emissions in South Korea., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)- Published
- 2020
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