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We present an analysis of the barriers and opportunities for incorporating air quality co-benefits into climate policy assessments. It is well known that many strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions also decrease emissions of health-damaging air pollutants and precursor species, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. In a survey of previous studies we found a range of estimates for the air quality co-benefits of climate change mitigation of $2-196/tCO2 with a mean of $49/tCO2, and the highest co-benefits found in developing countries. These values, although of a similar order of magnitude to abatement cost estimates, are only rarely included in integrated assessments of climate policy. Full inclusion of these co-benefits would have pervasive implications on climate policy including: optimal policy stringency, overall costs, distributional effects, robustness to discount rates, incentives for international cooperation, and the value of adaptation, forests, and climate engineering relative to mitigation. Under-valuation results in part from uncertainty in climatic damages, valuation inconsistency, and institutional barriers. Because policy debates are framed in terms of cost minimization, policy makers are unlikely to fully value air quality co-benefits unless they can be compared on an equivalent basis with the benefits of avoided climatic damages. While air quality co-benefits have been prominently portrayed as a hedge against uncertainty in the benefits of climate change abatement, this assessment finds that full inclusion of co-benefits depends on – rather than substitutes for – better valuation of climate damages.

Local Air Quality and Climate Policy: Valuing Ancillary Benefits When the Debate is About Minimizing Costs