PNNL

Abstract

The climate commitment to achieve carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060 in China has been announced recently. In the context of pursuing carbon neutrality, aerosol and precursor emissions are projected to be substantially reduced due to the anticipated clean air policies in China, which can potentially have a great impact on climate. Here we find that with localized emission scenarios in a fully coupled climate model, if China pursues carbon neutrality, the aerosol reductions could lead to anomalies of effective radiative forcing by 0.30 W m-2 in 2030 and 0.63 W m-2 in 2060. This can further warm the surface by 0.2 K in 2060 relative to 2015 over East Asia, with a maximum of warming higher than 0.5 K over eastern China. The potential future clean air actions can also enhance precipitation over southern China with maximum increases of 0.2–0.3 mm day-1 in 2030 and exceeding 0.3 mm day-1 in 2060. The stricter pollution control policies in the future will lead to more intense climate change. The warming induced by decreases in scattering aerosols could be dampened by 45–70% from the reduction in black carbon. It suggests that future clean air policies of switching to cleaner energy sources with less black carbon emissions for the residential sector are potentially beneficial to achieving the co-benefits for air quality and climate mitigation under carbon neutrality.