With the Innovation Zero conference on this week, we thought we’d delve into climate and clean air issues again. Climate change has become so mainstream that there seems to have been a semantic shift - we no longer need to refer to (or even explain) Net Zero**, we can now just say Zero and this will be understood. Of course, we hope that Innovation Zero actually involves a lot of innovation!
We’ve touched on this issue regularly, including in our round up last December. It’s something we think about a lot, moving in environmental circles where climate change is almost always the top concern. Biodiversity has got more of a look in recently, but we still sense that air pollution is the poor relation in these discussions. For example, the series of reports by the Clean Air Fund demonstrate the lack of funding for air pollution work, even as part of wider work on climate change.
From zero to one
As we’ve discussed before, the crucial overlap is the need to tackle fossil fuel usage. But there is a lot more to the climate movement - resilience, adaptation, carbon sequestration and so on. These are all crucial to solve a global problem: where action (or inaction) in one place can have a devastating effect somewhere else; and solutions to a problem caused in one region may be solved somewhere completely different.
On the other hand, air pollution is fundamentally a local or regional issue. The impacts are immediate and you generally don’t have to look too far to find the source of the problem (usually transport, industry, energy production and sometimes agriculture). And crucially, action to move away from fossil fuels is a necessary but not sufficient solution to air pollution. Fine particulate matter is now regarded at the biggest threat to human health, and it is partly linked to burning fossil fuels but not entirely.
Even if we bring down fossil fuel usage, the already hotter climate brings air pollution challenges. This includes more wildfires, increased ground-level ozone (which can be very harmful to human health), as well as a more unpredictable climate making the management of air pollution impacts even harder. The Clean Air Fund discusses some of the links here.
The bioverse
Biofuels are seen as a strong contributor to climate change mitigation, but their air pollution impact is more mixed - they may reduce harmful emissions but certainly don’t eliminate them. Some contend that the push to biofuels is downright dangerous. We are acutely aware of some of the unintended consequences of addressing one problem (ie climate) through a solution without a holistic view of its impacts, as the dieselgate scandal showed (discussed here).
Biodiversity (or Nature Based Solutions) is rightly getting more attention, both in its own right as as a means of combatting climate change. But can nature help us combat air pollution? Yes and no. Trees and other greenery can certainly help by absorbing pollutants. They can also bring down urban temperatures, with all round benefits. However, the ability for trees to address particulate matter pollution is more complex and ultimately “it depends”: this article neatly discusses this conundrum.
*Actually it’s blog 64. You’re welcome!
**The ambition (usually projected for 2050) that we should be putting no more carbon into the atmosphere than we are taking out.