Tom Grylls

So we often talk about global warming and points of degrees of Celsius of warming, and it can be quite hard things to capture.

But when you get into some of the details of how things like black carbon are affecting our health and our climate, you realize that there's also a regional and local

element to this.

So with black carbon, because it's so short-lived and it's not mixing itself evenly through the atmosphere, in some ways, when we implement solutions, we see the benefits closest to where we've reduced those emissions.

If that's the ships operating in the Arctic using heavy fuel oils, the proximity of those ships to the Arctic sea ice just means that we get more of this black carbon deposition.

But the same applies for.

communities who are living close to busy streets where there's lots of heavy-duty vehicles and diesel vehicles, or for households who are reliant on burning biomass or perhaps burning waste in the community.

So these impacts have this locality which often doesn't apply to long-lived greenhouse gases, which I think is also a powerful message and potentially another incentive for governments

to act.

And it comes to this disproportionate burden of these emissions as well.

So with black carbon, the sources is basically when we have incomplete combustion or where we're using particularly heavy or dirty fuels.

And when you map that out against the kind of sources, you see that often this is disproportionately affecting

low and middle income communities within a national scale, but then also disproportionately affecting low and middle income countries who perhaps have less electrification.

So there's a strong equity element and potential for poverty eradication in terms of some of the solutions that can help reduce black carbon emissions as well.

It's an amazing story from a really sad starting point.

Of course.

The resilience and the positive outcome in a small way post that earthquake that they were able to change that industry.

And generally, I think

coming at the problem from black carbon as a starting point helps to find some of these solutions that

we already know how to reduce these emissions.