Adopting effective strategies today to stop global warming could save more than 200,000 lives by the year 2030.
Currently, the net-zero emissions measures propose achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases that are emitted and those that are removed, in line with the Paris Agreement.
Now, a new study analyzed the impact of effectively meeting these goals: it was conducted by European scientists and published in Science Advances.
It highlights that if “net-zero emissions” measures were effectively applied today, lives would be saved and millions would be saved due to less air pollution.
It demonstrates that stopping global warming not only benefits the climate but also has immediate impacts on public health and the global economy.
The importance of stopping global warming
The research was led by Clàudia Rodés-Bachs, from the Basque Centre for Climate Change in Spain and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change in Italy.
It concluded that the greatest benefits of stopping global warming would be concentrated in China and India.
This is because these countries face very high levels of air pollution.
According to the analysis, meeting the goals would prevent 84,000 premature deaths in China and 73,000 in India before 2030.
Today, outdoor air pollution is the main environmental risk factor for health.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it was associated with more than 4.7 million premature deaths in 2021.
Pollutant particles increase the risk of developing lung and heart diseases, especially in urban areas and vulnerable populations.
The economic impact of stopping global warming
In terms of the economic aspect, meeting the “net-zero” goals would also generate significant savings globally.
This amount would exceed 2.2 billion dollars in less than a decade, according to the scientific team’s estimates.
The calculation includes healthcare costs, recovered productivity, and the statistical value of lives preserved by climate mitigation policies.
The positive health effects would begin to be noticed five years after adopting net-zero emissions policies, but improvements are projected to increase over the following two decades.
In China and India, the economic advantages of fewer diseases, absenteeism, and hospitalizations would be enormous thanks to the reduction of emissions.
How the innovative study was conducted
The researchers used the ENGAGE Global Scenarios database and the TM5-FASST system to estimate levels of air pollution under different scenarios.
First, they established possible emissions scenarios for pathways with and without net-zero emissions policies.
Then they associated these environmental data with disease and mortality rates based on previous scientific evidence to calculate the risks in each region.
“Our findings highlight the importance of scenario design to define effective mitigation policies,” wrote Rodés-Bachs and her collaborators.
In their study, the scientists called for climate change policies to include health and economy in their goals, not just the climate.
Thus, they recommended adapting measures to what is happening in each region and improving methods to obtain more accurate data on air quality.
The research even suggests helping the most vulnerable countries to finance the transition and distributing efforts according to each place’s responsibility in global emissions.
It also proposes further investigating how air pollution affects quality of life and income according to each area.
