Impact of Climate Change Policies on Environmental Inequalities in Great Britain

The UK Climate Change Act of 2008 requires an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions by 2050 compared with 1990. Strategies implemented to achieve this target offer the opportunity to improve public health and reduce environmental inequalities across Great Britain.We investigated the effect of alternative pathways to achieve the carbon dioxide reduction target on particulate and gaseous air pollution levels across different subpopulations in Great Britain.We linked the sophisticated air quality model CMAQ-Urban with the energy systems model UK TIMES to predict air pollution concentrations in 2035 and 2050 for different scenarios (two scenarios meet the emissions reduction target, two do not). We aggregated model outputs (fine particulate matter [PM2.5], nitrogen dioxide [NO2] and ozone) to the small-area level (ward ~6000 people) and compared concentrations by ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We used data on ethnicity from the 2011 census to classify wards according to their ethnic compos...