Health, Climate and Economic Effects of US and Global Decarbonization

This website provides state-level impacts for the US for several health, crop, and economic impacts of air pollution and climate change. Results are based on simulations of multiple future scenarios with NASA's GISS-E2.1-G composition-climate model. All analyzed impacts are provided for the SSP-based scenarios whereas only a subset is provided for the Energy-sector decarbonization simulations. Note that the SSP scenarios include population changes and in some cases increases in population under low-emission scenarios can more than offset decreases in pollution (e.g. Florida under SSP1).

Full documentation of the simulations and impact analyses was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, doi:10.1073/pnas.2104061118. A link to the article is available (open access) here.

A NASA news story on the study is here.

A description of national level results and much of the methodology is available in written testimony from an August 2020 Congressional hearing on climate and health, available here.

Select Scenario, Year(s) and Impact to view (Compare left and right if desired)

SSP analyses compare with SSP3_7.0 and Ene analyses with Current Path as reference cases

Decreases relative to baseline are given in percent, other quantities in absolute units

Health units: deaths/cases/admissions/visits

Labor units: days

Crop units: kilotonnes

Economic units: dollars for labor, thousands for crops, millions for deaths

Values are only shown for cases in which results exceed the ensemble standard deviation (and otherwise are NA)

US total

US total