The European Union Emissions Trading System might yield large co-benefits from pollution reduction.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38950366.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.2319908121 and PMC identifier 11252810.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing air pollution represent two pressing and interwoven environmental challenges. While international carbon markets, such as the European Union emissions trading system (EU ETS), have demonstrated their effectiveness in curbing carbon emissions (CO[Formula: see text]), their indirect impact on hazardous co-pollutants remains understudied. This study investigates how key toxic air pollutants-sulfur dioxide (SO[Formula: see text]), fine particulate matter (PM[Formula: see text]), and nitrogen oxides (NO[Formula: see text])-evolved after the introduction of the EU ETS with a comparative analysis of regulated and unregulated sectors. Leveraging the generalized synthetic control method, we offer an ex post analysis of how the EU ETS and concurrent emission standards may have jointly generated sizable pollution reductions in regulated sectors between 2005 and 2021. We provide an aggregate assessment that these pollution reductions could translate into large health co-benefits, potentially in the hundreds of billions of Euros, even when bounding the effect of emission standards. These order-of-magnitude estimates underscore key implications for policy appraisal and motivate further microlevel research around the health co-benefits of carbon abatement.