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Mon 14 Jul 2025
Efforts in east Asia to tackle air pollution might have led to a further acceleration in global warming, a study has found.
China, the largest economy in the area, has significantly cut air pollution over the past decade, with harmful smog reducing by 41% between 2013 and 2022. It achieved this primarily through placing limits on coal plants as well as implementing desulphurisation technologies.
But while the burning of fossil fuels increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the sulphate aerosols emitted have a cooling effect by shading Earth’s surface from sunlight.
Researchers at CICERO Centre for International Climate Research have found that air pollution therefore inadvertently held in check some greenhouse gas-driven warming.
According to a 2021 study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, aerosols cooled the global surface by 0.4°C. But this did not take into account the fact that since the early 2010s, China, then a major polluter, has implemented strict policies to improve air quality.
“We have been able to single out the climate effects of air-quality policies in east Asia over the last 15 years,” said Bjørn H Samset, lead author on the study. “Our main result is that the east Asian aerosol clean-up has likely driven much of the recent global warming acceleration, and also warming trends in the Pacific.”
Analysing the climate effects of emissions from a single region is challenging. It requires climate simulations that have not been readily available and updated emissions data that captures the actual pollution reductions in and around mainland China. Using a large set of simulations from eight different climate models, this study shows how a 75% reduction in east Asian sulphate emissions partially unmasks greenhouse gas-driven warming, and changes how temperatures rise in different parts of the world.
Laura Wilcox, a contributing author, said: “The climate effects of air pollution are short-lived, while the impact of carbon dioxide emissions can be felt for centuries. This means that the acceleration of warming due to reductions in air pollution is also likely to be short-lived. We will see an acceleration of warming while the unmasking takes place, and then a return to a greenhouse gas-driven rate of warming as air pollution stabilises.”
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