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ABSTRACT Future climate change may worsen air quality in many regions. However, evaluations of this ‘climate penalty’ on air quality have typically not assessed the radiative effects of

changes in short-lived aerosols. Additionally, China’s clean air goals will decrease pollutant emissions and aerosol loadings, with concomitant weakening of aerosol feedbacks. Here we assess

how such weakened aerosol direct effects alter the estimates of air pollution and premature mortality in China attributable to mid-century climate change under Representative Concentration

Pathway 4.5. We found that weakening aerosol direct effects cause boundary layer changes that facilitate diffusion. This reduces air-pollution exposure (~4% in fine particulate matter) and

deaths (13,800 people per year), which largely offset the additional deaths caused by greenhouse gas-dominated warming. These results highlight the benefits of reduced pollutant emissions

through weakening aerosol direct effects and underline the potential of pollution control measures to mitigate climate penalties locked in by greenhouse gas emissions. Access through your

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OVERTAKE GREENHOUSE GASES CAUSING A WARMER CLIMATE AND MORE WEATHER EXTREMES TOWARD CARBON NEUTRALITY Article Open access 09 November 2023 THE PROJECTED FUTURE DEGRADATION IN AIR QUALITY IS

CAUSED BY MORE ABUNDANT NATURAL AEROSOLS IN A WARMER WORLD Article Open access 02 February 2023 AEROSOL EFFECTS DURING HEAT WAVES IN SUMMER 2022 AND RESPONSES TO EMISSION CHANGE OVER CHINA

Article Open access 20 August 2024 DATA AVAILABILITY The RCP4.5 emissions in 2010 and 2050 are available from http://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at:8787/RcpDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&. The demographic

and epidemiological data for mortality calculation is provided in Supplementary Dataset. Source data for the main figures are available at

https://github.com/ChaopengHong/Hong_et_al_2020_Aerosol. The other data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. CODE

AVAILABILITY The two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ model is open source and publicly available. The WRF version 3.4 codes can be downloaded at

http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/download/get_source.html. The CMAQ version 5.0.2 codes and the WRF-CMAQ two-way package can be downloaded at https://www.cmascenter.org/download.cfm. The

build instructions and run instructions for the two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ model are available at https://www.airqualitymodeling.org/index.php/CMAQv5.0.2_Two-way_model_release_notes. The code

to generate the main figures is available at https://github.com/ChaopengHong/Hong_et_al_2020_Aerosol. Maps used in the spatial plots were created using the NCAR Command Language (v.6.4.0;

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California. _Am. J. Epidemiol._ 168, 632–637 (2008). Google Scholar  Download references ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China

(41625020 and 41921005). The work by Y.Z’s group at North Carolina State University (NCSU) (now at Northeastern University) was supported by the National Science Foundation EaSM program

(AGS-1049200) and the US Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (DE-SC0006695). This work was funded in part by the US National Science Foundation

(INFEWS grant EAR 1639318). The CESM simulations were conducted by T. Glotfelty at NCSU. We thank K. Yahya and T. Glotfelty at NCSU for their help during the generation of the initial and

boundary conditions from CESM for WRF-CMAQ simulations. We thank R. Leung at PNNL for providing the script to generate meteorological initial and boundary conditions from CESM to WRF. The

authors acknowledge high-performance computing support from Yellowstone (ark:/85065/d7wd3xhc) provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National

Science Foundation and Information Systems Laboratory. AUTHOR INFORMATION AUTHORS AND AFFILIATIONS * Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth

System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Chaopeng Hong, Qiang Zhang, Steven J. Davis, Xin Zhang, Dan Tong, Dabo Guan, Zhu Liu & Kebin He * Department of Earth System Science,

University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Chaopeng Hong & Steven J. Davis * Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA Yang Zhang

* Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA Yang Zhang * Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of

California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Steven J. Davis * State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Kebin He Authors * Chaopeng Hong View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Qiang Zhang View author publications You can also search for this

author inPubMed Google Scholar * Yang Zhang View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Steven J. Davis View author publications You can also

search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Xin Zhang View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Dan Tong View author publications You can

also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Dabo Guan View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Zhu Liu View author publications You

can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar * Kebin He View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar CONTRIBUTIONS Q.Z., Y.Z. and C.H.

designed the research. C.H. performed the research. Y.Z. contributed CESM simulation results and new analytical approaches. C.H., Q.Z. and S.J.D. interpreted the data. C.H., Q.Z., S.J.D. and

Y.Z. wrote the paper with input from all the co-authors. CORRESPONDING AUTHORS Correspondence to Qiang Zhang or Yang Zhang. ETHICS DECLARATIONS COMPETING INTERESTS The authors declare no

competing interests. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION PEER REVIEW INFORMATION _Nature Climate Change_ thanks Shuxiao Wang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer

review of this work. PUBLISHER’S NOTE Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. EXTENDED DATA EXTENDED DATA FIG.

1 PROJECTED CHANGES IN REGIONAL AIR QUALITY UNDER RCP4.5. Projected changes in annual mean PM2.5 concentrations A,C,E, and ozone season (April to September) average of daily 1-hour maximum

ozone B,D,F, over East Asia from 2010 to 2050 under RCP4.5. EXTENDED DATA FIG. 2 CHANGES IN ANTHROPOGENIC AIR POLLUTANT EMISSIONS UNDER RCP4.5. Changes in anthropogenic emissions of SO2 A,

NOx B, primary PM2.5 C, and VOCs D, over East Asia from 2010 to 2050 under RCP4.5. EXTENDED DATA FIG. 3 COMPARISON OF REGIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSED BY WEAKENING ADES AND AIR POLLUTANT

EMISSION REDUCTION. Projected annual mean changes in downward shortwave radiation at the surface A,B, near-surface air temperature at 2-m C,D, and planetary boundary layer height E,F, over

East Asia, caused by changing/weakening ADEs (a,c,e, ∆WeakeningADE, from the feedback and no-feedback simulations) and regional air pollutant emission reduction (b,d,f, ∆RegEmisChg) from

2010 to 2050 under RCP4.5. EXTENDED DATA FIG. 4 DISTRIBUTION OF SURFACE PM2.5 CONCENTRATION CHANGES ACROSS GRID CELLS GROUPED BY POPULATIONS. Projected changes in annual mean PM2.5

concentrations over China due to weakening ADEs (a, ∆WeakeningADE) and global-scale climate change (b, ∆GlobalClimChg) from 2010 to 2050 under RCP4.5. Box plot elements: center line, median;

box limits, upper (75th) and lower (25th) percentiles; whiskers, 1.5 times the interquartile range. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary notes, references and

Tables 1–3. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary Data 1 and 2. RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Hong, C., Zhang, Q., Zhang, Y. _et al._

Weakening aerosol direct radiative effects mitigate climate penalty on Chinese air quality. _Nat. Clim. Chang._ 10, 845–850 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0840-y Download

citation * Received: 12 September 2019 * Accepted: 09 June 2020 * Published: 03 August 2020 * Issue Date: September 2020 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0840-y SHARE THIS ARTICLE

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