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Mark Budolfson awarded $1.5m NSF grant on climate change and equity

CPLB’s Mark Budolfson, along with co-PIs Wei Peng at Penn State and Noah Scovronick at Emory University, have been awarded $1.5 million toward a project called Multi-scale modeling of interactions between climate change, air quality, and inequalities.

The project aims to understand and estimate “co-benefits” of climate policies, and assess how they should inform climate policy, with special attention to effects on health and equity. Air pollutants and greenhouse gases often come from the same sources, such as burning of fossil fuels (like coal, oil, natural gas). Policies that reduce greenhouse gases therefore also produce the “co-benefit” of reducing air pollution, which is responsible for millions of deaths per year globally. So far, little is known about how these co-benefits in air quality are likely to be distributed across populations, and how this distribution depends on choices between climate policy options. For example, cutting emissions by increasing use of electric forms of transportation will likely have different implications for populations living near major roads—often minorities and people of lower socioeconomic status—than reducing emissions by moving to cleaner power generation.

Since no systematic research has quantified these relationships, it is unclear which ways of pursuing climate policy will best achieve society’s health and equity objectives, and which ways might compromise them. The project aims to better understand these complex socio-environmental dynamics in two steps: First, estimating the co-benefits of different climate policies on air quality, and how those changes will differentially impact health across socioeconomic subpopulations. Second, exploring what these findings say about optimal climate policy decisions, using models that account for other aspects of the broader system including economic and demographic change, the impacts of climate change itself, and societal goals to promote wellbeing and equity.