Handbook of Air Quality and Climate Change

This handbook covers the air quality/air pollution from the viewpoints of causing impacts on human/ecosystem health and climate change. Traditionally, air pollution has been a concern mainly in terms of its impacts on human health, and it is still an immediate public and governmental concern in most Asian countries. However, in recent years so-called extreme weather events, such as stronger tropical cyclones, flooding, drought, and other phenomena, have been manifested causing tremendous losses of human lives and properties. Importantly, climate models tell us that such extreme weather events are actually induced by anthropogenic global warming. It has been pointed out that mitigation or alleviation of such climate change leading to the extreme weather events in the next 30 years can be possible only by reducing air pollutants with positive radiative forcing such as ozone or methane, which are called short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs). Here, concerns about mitigation of air pollutants from the points of human health and climate change have merged.