Tom Grylls

what's happening in the atmosphere in a way that doesn't silo climate change and air pollution.

And there's loads of different benefits to that.

There's benefits in the way we can communicate about it, in the way that we can talk about local benefits as well as global benefits, which is often an important driver in different parts of the world to take these actions to reduce these emissions.

When we think about the economic benefits of taking action,

Often the calculations are done saying, this is an air pollution measure.

So we know if we reduce this, okay, we see these health benefits.

We might see an increase in productivity, some reduced healthcare costs, some longer lives lived.

And that adds up to a big economic benefit.

And then you might do a different calculation with climate change where you're looking at what's happening in terms of temperature, what that means for extreme heat, for flooding and other things.

But actually, often these solutions can benefit both.

And if you combine the economic benefits of both, suddenly the case to take these actions becomes much more compelling.

And there's one really interesting statistic that came out of a Lancet study in 2019 that says

the economic benefits associated with clean air would outweigh the costs of delivering on the Paris Agreement.

So there's a few numbers behind that, but basically the amount it would cost for us to deliver on the Paris Agreement of keeping the world to 1.5 degrees, the way in which that would actually help clean up the air would outweigh those costs over a fairly long period.

But it shows that the...

economic case can really value from not siloing these two issues.

Sure, so methane, tropospheric ozone, and black carbon all contribute to outdoor air pollution.

Black carbon and tropospheric ozone themselves, when we breathe them in, they have different effects.

Black carbon, for example, not just has an effect on our lungs, but these very small particles that can get into our bloodstream and are increasingly linked to cardiovascular, heart problems, and also cognitive problems.

On the whole, these are two important pollutants that make up the suite of air pollution.