Air Pollutant Emissions and Impacts of Energy Systems

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Climate change is a global challenge linked to air quality and energy. In the past five years, unconventional oil and gas came to dominate production in Canada and the United States. The production and use of fossil fuels for energy is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and air pollutants that harm human health. Efforts to combat climate change by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels thus yield an added benefit by reducing air pollution-related risks like heart attacks, asthma attacks, lung cancer, and premature death. In Toronto, 30% of air pollution-related deaths are attributed to U.S. pollution sources. With both countries making commitments to curb carbon emissions to the United Nations, it is increasingly important for Canada to develop integrated modeling that captures the linkages of energy, climate change, and air quality to understand these complex relationships and to inform sustainable decisions.******This program in “Air Pollutant Emissions and Impacts of Energy Systems” will help Canada make informed future energy choices by (a) developing new knowledge about pollutant emissions and health-related air quality impacts from oil and gas (b) developing a novel modeling framework to analyze the health-related air quality impacts of North American energy systems: the North American Energy Atmosphere Transboundary Impacts Assessment Model (NEATIAM). These objectives provide a program to evaluate Canadian and American policies and inform cross-border coordination on planned energy, climate, and air quality policies. ******This Discovery Grant will improve how we assess the air quality impacts of energy systems by (1) constraining uncertainties in pollutant emissions from oil and gas development (2) comparing and improving methods to estimate emissions responses to energy policy (3) assessing the role of uncertainty in emissions along the policy-to-impacts pathway. These studies each develop a capability of NEATIAM and address fundamental questions about the sources of air pollutant emissions, their uncertainty, and methods to evaluate their health-related impacts. ******The results of this program will advance state-of-the-art modeling techniques used globally to evaluate the air quality benefits of climate and clean energy policies. Without these advancements, studies will continue to underestimate emissions from oil and gas by about a factor of four, and Canada will remain unable to quantify significant local, near-term air quality-related health and economic benefits from combating climate change. Students using these techniques will be the first HQP trained to do so in Canada, and for Canada. These new HQP and modeling capabilities are needed to place Canada research and Canadian implications in the context of global policies and global literature linking energy, climate change, and air quality to support sustainable decisions.**