Japan-IIASA Collaboration to Promote Integrated Actions for Clean Air and a Sustainable Future in Asia

The global community faces the triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These three crises interact with each other, and a sustainable transition requires addressing these issues in an integrated manner. In Asia, air pollution is the single greatest threat to human health and a sustainable future. Effective solutions to tackle air pollution must be implemented in coordination with actions to address climate change and biodiversity loss. To facilitate the formulation of cost-effective solutions for these complex challenges, the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MOEJ) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) have carried out collaborative research projects to support policy formulation addressing air pollution, climate change, and other SDGs, highlighting potential co-benefits of proposed interventions, with a focus on Asia. It is expected that the project outputs will contribute to strengthening the science-policy interface, facilitating science-based policy formulation to effectively tackle sustainable development challenges.

This workshop aimed to present the results of these collaborative projects and communicate how state-of-the-art modeling analysis can enhance the science-policy interface and support the formulation of sustainable development policies focusing on air pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss in Asia. It should be noted that the workshop was organized as one of the sessions at the Better Air Quality Conference 2023 (BAQ2023), which took place from 15-17 November 2023 at the Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines.

In Part 1, the MOEJ-IIASA Collaborative Project on "Interactions between urban and rural air pollution in Asia, and the multiple development benefits of coordinated action" was presented. The results of the PM2.5 source analysis were reported for the entire East and South-East Asia region, as well as for large cities in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Discussions included how these results would change under a scenario assuming current policies by 2050 and a scenario where air pollution and climate change measures are taken by 2050. The results of the analysis for ASEAN were also reported, showing that air pollution and climate change measures can lead to improvements in various SDGs. Additionally, the results indicated that initiatives in rural areas, metropolitan areas, at the national level, or through international coordination are all important, and their effective implementation requires urban-local or international partnerships.

In Part 2, the MOEJ-IIASA Collaborative Project on "Asian Initiative on SDG-compliant national and regional decarbonization strategies" was presented. The results of the health impacts of PM2.5 estimated for current policy scenarios, air pollution control scenarios, climate change control scenarios, and integrated air pollution and climate change control scenarios for the year 2050 in East, South-East, and South Asia were reported. These results showed that integrated air pollution and climate change control efforts can significantly reduce health impacts due to PM2.5. The results of a modeling analysis of the interlinkages between biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation measures showed that the negative impacts on ecosystems due to climate mitigation measures could be mitigated by reducing land-use change through dietary change.

Part 3 discussed how these research findings can support effective policy-making. It was pointed out that there is a lot of research and investment in India on serious air pollution, but access to research information and data is inadequate despite a lot of available information. It is important to develop an easily accessible research pool. Additionally, it was pointed out that downscaling the analysis results and matching them to local issues, as well as visualizing policy impacts considering local characteristics through scenario analysis, are needed for effective policy-making.