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The current nationally determined contributions, pledged by the countries under the Paris Agreement, are far from limiting climate change to below 2 ∘C temperature increase by the end of the century. The necessary ratcheting up of climate policy is projected to come with a wide array of additional benefits, in particular a reduction of today's 4.5 million annual premature deaths due to poor air quality. This paper therefore addresses the question how climate policy and air pollution–related health impacts interplay until 2050 by developing a comprehensive global modeling framework along the cause and effect chain of air pollution–induced social costs. We find that ratcheting up climate policy to a 2 ∘ compliant pathway results in welfare benefits through reduced air pollution that are larger than mitigation costs, even with avoided climate change damages neglected. The regional analysis demonstrates that the 2 ∘C pathway is therefore, from a social cost perspective, a "no-regret option" in the global aggregate, but in particular for China and India due to high air quality benefits, and also for developed regions due to net negative mitigation costs. Energy and resource exporting regions, on the other hand, face higher mitigation cost than benefits. Our analysis further shows that the result of higher health benefits than mitigation costs is robust across various air pollution control scenarios. However, although climate mitigation results in substantial air pollution emission reductions overall, we find significant remaining emissions in the transport and industry sectors even in a 2 ∘C world. We therefore call for further research in how to optimally exploit climate policy and air pollution control, deriving climate change mitigation pathways that maximize co-benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change will affect the energy system in a number of ways, one of which is through changes in demands for heating and cooling in buildings. Understanding the potential effect of climate change on heating and cooling demands requires taking into account not only the manner in which the building sector might evolve over time, but also important uncertainty about the nature of climate change itself. In this study, we explore the uncertainty in climate change impacts on heating and cooling requirement by constructing estimates of heating and cooling degree days (HDD/CDDs) for both reference (no-policy) and 550 ppmv CO concentration pathways built from three different Global Climate Models (GCMs) output and three scenarios of gridded population distribution. The implications that changing climate and population distribution might have for building energy consumption in the U.S. and China are then explored by using the results of HDD/CDDs as inputs to a detailed, building energy model, nested in the long-term global integrated assessment framework, Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). The results across the modeled changes in climate and population distributions indicate that unabated climate change would cause building sector's final energy consumption to decrease modestly (6 % decrease or less depending on climate models) in both the U.S. and China by the end of the century as decreased heating consumption more than offsets increased cooling using primarily electricity. However, global climate change virtually has negligible effect on total CO emissions in the buildings sector in both countries. The results also indicate more substantial implications for the fuel mix with increases in electricity and decreases in other fuels, which may be consistent with climate mitigation goals. The variation in results across all scenarios due to variation of population distribution is smaller than variation due to the use of different climate models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]