Air Pollution

(asked on 27th February 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of (1) the contribution of soot particles in the atmosphere as agents of global warming, and (2) removing soot from the atmosphere as a means of combating climate change due to global warming; and what action they are taking to reduce soot particles and other short-term climate pollutants from the atmosphere and prevent an increase in such pollutants in (a) the short term, and (b) over a longer period.


This question was answered on 6th March 2017

Soot particles, also known as black carbon, exert a warming influence on the climate through their enhanced ability to absorb sunlight. They also affect the climate through their impact upon cloud formation and upon the reflectance of the Earth’s surface. These effects make the overall impact of black carbon on the climate less certain.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 5th Assessment Report in 2013 showed that soot ranks third behind carbon dioxide and methane as a climate warming agent, excluding its influence on clouds. Recent work by the Hadley Centre found that the elimination of soot emissions between 2010 and 2100 could lead to an approximately 0.15 degree centigrade decrease in global mean surface temperature. However, as several measures that reduce black carbon emissions also reduce other emissions of cooling pollutants such as sulphate and brown carbon it may not be technically possible to realise this benefit in full, even if measures could be fully deployed globally.

The government is taking a number of actions to reduce emissions fine particles (PM2.5) for air quality and health reasons which will lead to decreases in emissions of black carbon and reduce wasted energy resources. These include measures to reduce vehicle particle emissions, increasing the efficiency of wood burning stoves through product standards and raising awareness of the benefits of using quality fuel and the implementation of the Non Road Mobile Machinery Regulations.

Other short lived climate pollutants include methane and tropospheric ozone. Reductions of emissions of methane and precursors of ozone are occurring through measures on vehicle and combustion plant emissions and through the natural gas mains replacement programme. In the longer term we have agreed, in the revised Gothenburg Protocol to the Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution, stringent emission ceilings which constrain total UK emissions of fine particles (PM2.5) and oxides of nitrogen from 2020 onwards. Methane is included in our ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Climate Change Act 2008.

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