What price clean air? This benefit alone will cover cost of 1.5°C climate action

The economic benefits of breathing cleaner air – free from coal plant pollution and fossil  car fumes – could alone cancel out the costs of shifting to renewables and electric vehicles and other climate mitigation actions, a new report has found.

The finding comes from the hefty Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, which was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday night along with the latest dire warning from scientists that we’re losing the race to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

But the report presents a number of climate upsides, including the huge potential for readily available technologies like solar and wind to make substantial and rapid reductions in emissions in the coming critical decade.

“We are up the proverbial creek, but we do have a paddle. That’s really the key message from the report,” says the Australian National University’s Frank Jotzo, a member of the report’s core writing team.

“The report assesses that the technical opportunity to cut emissions the world over amounts to half, we can halve emissions globally between now and 2030, at incremental costs of less than $US100 per tonne of carbon dioxide.

“So it’s not a prohibitively high price or anything like that. And if policy effort was consistently applied, right across the world, in every sector, every country, then we’d see a halving of global emissions.”

But Jotzo says the IPCC report also provides an “unequivocal statement” that the economic benefits of limiting global warming to below 2°C outweigh the costs of doing so, even without factoring in the sort of benefits that can’t be economically quantified.

The report puts it this way:

“Accelerated climate action can also provide co-benefits. Many mitigation actions would have benefits for health through lower air pollution, active mobility (e.g., walking, cycling), and shifts to sustainable healthy diets.

“Strong, rapid and sustained reductions in methane emissions can limit near-term warming and improve air quality by reducing global surface ozone.

“The economic benefits for human health from air quality improvement arising from mitigation action can be of the same order of magnitude as mitigation costs, and potentially even larger.

“Even without accounting for all the benefits of avoiding potential damages the global economic and social benefit of limiting global warming to 2°C exceeds the cost of mitigation in most of the assessed literature,” the report says.

“Despite their dire warnings, the IPCC offers reasons to be hopeful,” says Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute.

“[It] may seem daunting, but the case for action could not be more clear: cost-effective solutions exist today that can avert the worst consequences of climate change, offer huge economic benefits, improve people’s health and livelihoods and build more resilient communities.”