08 July 2013

EC4MACS: Reducing air pollution, minimizing climate change

July 2013: Options Magazine, Summer 2013.

While connections between air pollution, climate change, and human and environmental health are intuitive, what has been missing is a systematic way of linking together all aspects of the environment and society to anticipate the impact that policies in one area may have on another region or sector.

© Lane Erickson | Dreamstime.com

© Lane Erickson | Dreamstime.com

A host of complex and well-documented facts make decisions in the field of climate and air quality extremely difficult for policymakers. Unless these interactions are put into the right context, they could not only prevent a cost-effective solution being found to both problems, but might also lead to trade?offs that unnecessarily waste Europe’s important economic resources.

Earth’s atmosphere is a complex and continually changing composition of gas, moisture, and particles. A growing proportion of these—greenhouse gases (GHGs), polluted/acidic cloud water, and solids like soot and dust—are anthropogenically produced and have adverse effects on the climate, on human and environmental health, as well as on food production and water availability. While greenhouse gases and air pollution were once distinct research areas, the boundaries between them are blurring, as more is discovered about their interconnected sources and effects, as well as the co-benefits and trade-offs of tackling them simultaneously.

In 2006 the European Consortium for Modelling of Air Pollution and Climate Strategies (EC4MACS) was established to develop tools to help European policymakers managing climate change and air pollution to tackle those challenges in a coordinated way. Funded bythe EU LIFE Program, it brought together leading research institutions from across Europe.

EC4MACS developed the first?ever fully integrated modeling tool to assess and define the actions that EU governments could take to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in a synergistic way.

IIASA is leading the Consortium which will run through 2013. Each member of the project contributes sophisticated and well established economic and environmental modeling tools for different project sectors. The IIASA GAINS model integrates the information across all sectors, models, and regions, assessing the effectiveness and costs of more than 1,000 alternative emission control measures used across all 43 European countries in the study.The results from the GAINS model feed directly into the GEM-E3 general equilibrium model, which estimates the macro-economic impacts of mitigation strategies, and into the BENEFIT model, which assesses the impacts of pollution on human health.

In fact, it was the EC4MACS modeling collaboration that first pointed up the significant interactions and potentially large economic synergies between air pollution control and greenhouse gas mitigation. This meant, essentially, that policies and management strategies could be chosen that tackle air pollution and reduce greenhouse gases, while at the same time contributing to other policy objectives, for example, economic growth, competitiveness, resource efficiency, and import dependency.

The findings of EC4MACS are not too optimistic. There have been improvements in pollution levels in Europe, but serious threats remain to human and environmental health. The current stringent policies in place should bring about a decline in emissions, but they are not sufficient to achieve a sustainable environment in Europe. The bright note is that cost-effective options had been found to improve air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and that the benefits of implementing these would outweigh their cost.

The project research was completed in 2012, and now provides the analytical framework for the review of the entire EU air policy in 2013, and the development of the European Commission’s forthcoming climate policy proposals.

As with many IIASA products, the modeling toolkit is adaptable to national and regional conditions so that the EC4MACS work can be applied to other regions of the world. This should help other countries to distill specific policy interventions to address their immediate policy priorities, while the toolkit contributes to meaningful and effective international pathways toward challenges of a global nature.

Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) Model


The Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model provides a consistent framework for the analysis of the co-benefits of strategies to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

The model considers emissions of:

  • Carbon dioxide (CO2)
  • Methane (CH4)
  • Nitrous oxide (N2O)
  • Fluorinated greenhouse gases (F-Gases)
  • Particulate matter (TSP, PM10, PM2.5, PM1, Black Carbon, Organic Carbon)
  • Sulfur dioxide (SO2)
  • Nitrogen oxides (NOx)
  • Volatile organic compounds (VOC)
  • Ammonia (NH3)
  • Carbon monoxide (CO)
  • Mercury


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Last edited: 08 July 2013

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