Can the global air pollution crisis lead to effective climate action?

Is it safe to take a jog outside today? Should schools stay open? How do I protect myself and my family from extreme levels of air pollution affecting our health? 

These questions have been top of mind for many Americans as large swaths of the northeastern and midwestern U.S. have continued to be shrouded in particulate matter stemming from unusually strong Canadian forest fires. 

But the current air pollution levels in North America this summer are not far from the routine poor to hazardous air quality experienced throughout the year by millions of people around the world. For the 33 million people living in Delhi, for example, air pollution is estimated to reduce life expectancies by a staggering nine years. 

In addition to devastating public health effects, air pollution can be intimately tied to climate change since particulate matter is often a co-pollutant of carbon emissions. In other words, particulate matter is commonly released with the burning of fossil fuels, forests and agricultural waste — activities that also cause climate change. 

As a warming planet increases fire susceptibility in Canada and in many places around the world, these episodes are bound to happen more frequently in the absence of decisive global climate action. Therefore, current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.

The air pollution challenge faced in India and other low- and middle-income countries today is similar to what the rapidly industrializing economies of the United Kingdom and the U.S. experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries: As the economy expanded in the last few decades while relying on power generated by coal and oil, industrial pollution increased dramatically. Making matters worse, the increased adoption of mechanized farming in India and many other places also leads to widespread practices of agricultural stubble burning. These controlled but widespread fires reliably produce clouds of particulate matter in many regions, similar to what New York, Washington D.C. and Minnesota have been experiencing on and off this summer. 

Low- and middle-income countries have been grappling with these issues for many years, and high-income countries are increasingly paying attention to policies that simultaneously improve air quality and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Evidence generated by researchers affiliated with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where I am a senior policy manager, showed that in many cases improving regulation and behavioral incentives can reduce pollution at a low cost. Our lab, which runs the King Climate Action Initiative, is a global research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Evaluations of policies such as improved and more transparent auditing of large polluters or emissions trading schemes for particulate matter have started building convincing evidence that these approaches work at a low cost in high-growth economies like India. Government incentives can also decrease air pollution by changing harmful individual behaviors on a mass scale. For example, one study found that giving payments to farmers can curb agricultural burning when the program is designed with the parameters that fit the local context. 

These policies are not limited to low- and middle-income countries. In the United States, researchers are partnering with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to evaluate the impact of bolstering regulation of oil and gas facilities with a machine learning model to predict unintended hydrocarbon emissions, including methane. Methane is both a harmful air pollutant and a greenhouse gas, trapping 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Researchers are studying the effects on operators’ behavior, emissions, and cost. 

Beyond regulation and behavioral incentives to curb pollution, new studies across economic contexts are exploring how protective technology, such as HEPA air filters, can be optimally used in households, businesses and schools.

The gravity and intractable nature of the global air pollution crisis offer no silver bullets. However, similar to the problem posed by chemicals depleting the ozone layer in the 1980s, which led to durable and effective international regulation enshrined in the Montreal Protocol, air pollution from particulate matter is also a direct threat to health with proven, scalable solutions.

For this reason, it represents an opportunity to make climate change more concrete to a larger public that cannot necessarily relate to a 1.5 degrees Celsius target and net zero commitments by 2050. 

For too long, well-intentioned climate change policies have focused on abstract goals with solutions that are sometimes perceived to (and sometimes truly) penalize rather than protect. This leads to harmful backlash, as exemplified by movements such as the Yellow Vests in France, and reinforces a discourse pitting disconnected elites against those who feel the effects of such policies. By acting now on issues like air pollution that palpably affect most people, climate policy can finally become popular. 

Andre Zollinger is a senior policy manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, with over a decade of experience advising governments, companies, startups and NGOs in climate change policy.