Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar

Climate change can influence air pollution, one of the leading environmental and health risk factors, through complex pathways. Better understanding of how a changing climate will influence the levels and distributions of air quality will improve climate impact assessment and inform decisions to address the negative effects of climate change on human health. In this talk, I will present two projects focusing on climate impacts on energy systems and wildfires. In the first study, we study how droughts influence the emissions from electricity systems, air quality, and human health in the Western US. We find significant increases in fossil fuel usage under droughts and quantify the effects on emissions and air quality. Under future climate, these drought-induced impacts likely remain large, and even rapid expansion of renewable energy has limited ability to curb these impacts. In the second study, we combine remote sensing, statistical models, and global climate models to project wildfire PM2.5 and its health effects in the US under future climate. We quantify the changes in wildfire PM2.5 in each census tract under future climate change, and find that wildfire will likely become the most important source of PM2.5 in many parts of the US.