Co-benefits of CO2 and PM2.5 Emission Reduction

Climate change and air pollution are two major environmental issues linked in several ways. Air pollutants reduction would benefit from the Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions mitigation policy. China is facing a serious air pollution and GHG emissions. Effective and low cost strategies to solve these problems have been discussed by a number of researchers. Previous studies typically evaluated near-term and direct co-benefits, neglecting the socio-economic impacts on CO2 and PM2.5 emission. In this paper, production-based and consumption-based emissions are quantified to compare the differences. Input-output analysis (IOA) is adopted to investigate the consumption-based CO2 and PM2.5 emissions that result from the current monetary flows and energy structure. The correlations of CO2 and PM2.5 emissions from both consumption-based and production-based perspectives are assessed to see the extent to which these co-benefits are valued in integrated assessment models. We distribute the indirect emissions to original sector and identify the correlations of CO2 reductions for air quality in Beijing, which provide a new point of view on formulating impartial and effective polices of alleviating the air pollution and reducing CO2 emissions.