Current and future economic growth will cause serious air quality problems, negatively impacting human health and crop production, unless further air pollution control policies are implemented. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing the planet to warm. Global warming is a major component of climate change. It is causing floods and droughts, affecting food supplies and water quality and availability. Infectious disease and insect-borne diseases are also likely to increase, while higher temperatures can also worsen air pollution.
To face these great challenges, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) funds the research program Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases (AIR). AIR's system aim is to develop new policies, in order to maximise co-benefits between climate and air quality strategies, and economic and social policy objectives. AIR projects provide tools that explore cost-effective emission control strategies in several global countries, policy reports, key findings that are relevant for decision-makers, scientific publications and access to global databases on emissions and air pollution.
To support AIR program, IIASA developed the Greenhouse gas Air pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model.
What GAINS does
GAINS provides an authoritative framework for assessing strategies that reduce emissions of multiple air pollutants and greenhouse gases, minimising costs and their negative effects on human health, ecosystems and climate change. In particular, the model collects together information on future economic, energy and agricultural development, potential reduction of emissions and its costs, atmospheric dispersion and environmental sensitivities towards air pollution.
The GAINS model offers three ways to assess policy interventions: simulation of the costs, health and ecosystem benefits of user-defined packages of emission control measures; cost-effectiveness analysis to identify least-cost packages of measures that achieve user-defined policy targets; cost-benefit assessments that maximise (monetised) net benefits of policy interventions.
Moreover, the GAINS model can be used in conjunction with the energy model MESSAGE, the land-use model GLOBIOM, the aggregated macro-economic model MACRO and the simple climate model MAGICC, creating a framework that covers all major sectors, including agriculture, forestry, energy, and industrial sources, permitting a concurrent assessment of how to address major sustainability challenges.
Benefits
There are a series of key benefits related to the GAINS model. In particular, the model can explore cost-effective strategies to reduce emissions of air pollutants to meet specified environmental targets. It also assesses how specific control measures simultaneously influence different pollutants, permitting a combined analysis of air pollution and climate change mitigation strategies, which can reveal important synergies and trade-offs between these policy areas. The GAINS methodology identifies cost-effective portfolios of specific measures that improve local air quality and, at the same time, reduce global climate change. This focus on actions that yield co-benefits at different spatial and temporal scales provides a fresh perspective to clean air and climate policy development in many countries and world regions.