This project aims to provide improved understanding of the complex interactions between climate change and conventional air pollution, which are linked because greenhouse gases and conventional air pollutants result from shared generation processes, they interact chemically in the atmosphere, jointly affect climate, and the impacts of these environmental changes have multiple and potentially non- marginal effects on economic activities.

Federal standards for fine particulate matter and tropospheric ozone have become increasingly stringent over the past several decades. States preparing attainment plans will be challenged with accounting for the regional and longer-range transport of these pollutants and their precursors and with the higher marginal costs of additional permanent or annual emissions reductions in the future.

The objective of this effort is to improve the way that technology and uncertainty are represented and treated in integrated assessment models (IAMs) of the coupled human-climate system. The research project will address key gaps in representing technological change and the treatment of risk and uncertainty within IAMs.

In this project we are using a global economic model with land-use linked to a model of vegetation and soil processes to investigate how to extend carbon taxes to create incentives to avoid land use emissions or to increase carbon storage on land, or otherwise limit the climate implications of land use change. Carbon taxes could be a highly efficient policy tool for regulating emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.