Development of Environmental Action Plans for Adaptation to Climate Change: A Perspective of Air Quality Management

Received: November 1, 2022
Revised: February 27, 2023
Accepted: March 10, 2023

 Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Cite this article:

Chen, H.S., Tam, K.I., Zhao, Y.L., Yuan, L., Wang, W., Lin, M., Chiang, P.C. (2023). Development of Environmental Action Plans for Adaptation to Climate Change: A Perspective of Air Quality Management. Aerosol Air Qual. Res. 23, 220377. https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.220377

HIGHLIGHTS

• Impacts of climate change on air quality are summarized.
• Climate change adaptation plans concerning air (CCAP-Air) are reviewed.
• Key strategies on CCAP-Air are proposed.
• Priority actions based on NBS are suggested.

Keywords: Climate Change Adaptation Plan concerning Air (CCAP-Air), Climate and air quality models, AIoT, Nature-Based Solution (NBS), Green finance

1 INTRODUCTION

The world meteorological organization (WMO) has pointed out that climate change not only affects the global physical environment but also adversely impacts on human beings through some pathways such as health and food security (WMO, 2019). Among all aspects of the environment, air quality can be directly affected by climate conditions and plays a key role in maintaining the life existence of most earth creatures (Jacob and Winner, 2009). The common ways of climate change affecting air quality are summarized below, and the correlation between meteorological variables and air-related issues is organized in Table 1.

Ozone: High temperature stabilizes the atmosphere and forms a stationary dome to trap the anthropogenic emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO_x), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and carbon monoxide (CO) to provide an ideal environment for the additional air pollutants’ formation (Climate Central, 2019; US EPA, 2022). Also, the increasing unhealthy ozone days directly or indirectly affect human health, causing an increase in the morbidity risk of certain diseases or premature death of vulnerable people (Hong et al., 2019; Orru et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2019b).

Particulate matter (PM): The weather condition caused by climate change alters the chemical components of particles and increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires (Nolte et al., 2018; Requia et al., 2019), thereby increasing the ambient PM concentrations and causing the population at health risk related to diseases of acute myocardial infarction, cardiovascular, respiratory, ischemic heart, cerebrovascular, and even death (Bae and Hong, 2018; Hong et al., 2019).

Atmospheric deposition: Climate change affects atmospheric transport and deposition patterns of elements such as sulfur, mercury, and nitrogen (Burns et al., 2011; Shi et al., 2018). The formation of acid precipitation due to climate change affects the chemistry component of the surface water, causes foliar injuries, affects the bioaccumulation and biomagnification of the ecosystem, and even increases the health risks of the exposed population (Hansen et al., 2015).

Extreme weather event: Extreme weather will be the new normal worldwide. The vagaries of climate conditions change the frequency, intensity, and duration of climate extreme events, producing heavy precipitation, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, heatwaves, storms, floods, snow, and frigid weather (Diffenbaugh et al., 2017; Ornes, 2018), which has brought tremendous damage to the ecosystem, economic sectors, and human health (Seneviratne et al., 2012).

To respond to the impacts of climate change on air quality, it is necessary to integrate climate change into the decision-making process, especially into national environmental policy. Currently, measures for solving climate change are mainly divided into mitigation and adaptation, the former emphasizes reducing or eliminating greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from sources into the atmosphere such as replacing the usage of fossil fuel with renewable energy, developing advanced carbon neutrality, and capturing technology to achieve net-zero carbon emission. The latter varies from climate change mitigation, which more focuses on using policy mechanisms to improve society’s response so as to reduce the damaging risk that may cause by climate change, thereby enhancing adaptive capacity, increasing resilience, and reducing vulnerability to climate change, ultimately promoting society’s sustainable development (Singh et al., 2022). The typical climate change adaptation measures include establishing the climate-related comprehensive database and developing monitoring and response systems to improve disaster-responsive capacity, designing climate-robust infrastructure and buildings to enhance resilience, and improving people’s awareness toward climate change to form the connected, organized, and well-prepared community (City of Vancouver, 2018). Although we can reduce GHGs emissions by using mitigation measures, climate change still occurs and cannot be avoided. Therefore, the communities affected by climate change need more guidance on the aspect of climate change adaptation. Based on this reality demand, various countries/regions/cities have established local climate adaptation action plans to increase their responsive capacity for climate change risks. For example, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) published a Climate Adaptation Action Plan in 2014, proposing five strategic goals and eight guiding principles (U.S. EPA, 2014). The UK government published the 25-Year Environmental Plan in 2018, where six goals were reported (HM Government, 2018). Germany also implemented the Adaptation Action Plan (APA) in 2011, where three goals and six principles were set (German Federal Cabinet, 2011). Japan proposed the National Plan for Adaptation to the Impacts of Climate Change in 2015, where each sector’s basic principles, approaches, and directional measures toward climate change adaptation were illustrated (Cabinet Decision, 2015). Australia also issued the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy in 2015, describing the visions, principles, and sectors' strategies for resilience and adaptation (Australian Government, 2015). The specific contents of the adaptation action plans among the above developed countries will be illustrated later.

In summary, to establish efficient climate change adaptation plans with respect to air, it is necessary to clarify the linkage between climate change and air-related issues and review the relevant plans among major developed countries. In order to clarify a series of causal relationships between climate change and air-related issues (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2023), the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework is introduced to identify the “driver” (natural system, human system) of impacts of climate change on air quality, through “pressure” (meteorological parameters) to “state” (changes in global physical climate condition) and “impact” on the atmospheric environment (e.g., ozone, particulate matter, atmospheric deposition, extreme weather event), finally leading to government’s “response” (making climate change adaptation plan) to tackle climate change (Fig. 1). Considering the necessity of proposing a climate change adaptation plan for air quality, the goals of this research include two steps: First, the state-of-art of climate change adaptation plans with respect to air quality management from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Australia are summarized in detail. Second, a climate change adaptation plan based on a perspective of air quality management is proposed according to the air climate change adaptation plans among different countries, where main strategies are suggested to respond to the impacts of climate change. This can be the priority consideration for solving air-related climate change problems in the future.

 Fig. 1. The Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework of integrating impacts of climate change on air quality management represents the driving force of climate change, the pressure, state, and impacts brought by climate change, and the corresponding response for worldwide countries to tackle climate change.

2 ADAPTATION PLANS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AMONG VARIOUS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES 

2.1 United States

U.S. EPA launched the climate change plan in 2014, in which each department and office initially evaluated the impacts of climate change on society (U.S. EPA, 2014). The key policies to solve the vulnerability of society to climate change were stated as (1) improving air quality; (2) protecting America’s water; (3) increasing resource efficiency; (4) ensuring chemical security and (5) enforcing environmental laws. Main climate change adaptation plans for air quality management are summarized as follows:

1. Integrate the impacts of climate change on ozone effects, PM health effects, and indoor air quality into the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).
   
   
2. Incorporate the information about climate change adaptation into guidance, outreach tools, and communication with participants of partnership programs and other stakeholders.
   
   
3. Collaborate with research teams to promote research related to the impact exploration of climate change on the atmospheric mechanism of pollutants and ecosystems.
   
   
4. Develop modeling tools to simulate the diffusion mechanism of pollutants under meteoritical parameters and evaluate the health effects of humans caused by climate change.
   
   
5. Identify the vulnerable population and places by improving access to information, developing education, and providing technical and financial support.
   
   

 
2.2 United Kingdom

The 25-Year Environmental Plan of the UK aimed to keep the environment and creatures healthy and make it in a better state (HM Government, 2018). The key policies to achieve the above goal were stated as (1) sustainably using and managing land; (2) recovering nature; (3) connecting humans with the environment; (4) improving resource efficiency and reducing pollution and waste; (5) protecting seas and oceans as clean, productive, and diverse, and (6) protecting the global environment. Specific climate change adaptation plans adopted to achieve clean air are summarized as follows:

1. Work with farmers to make fertilizer usage more efficient by introducing clear rules and advice and encouraging the production of low carbon emission fertilizers such as the replacement of extracting raw materials (ammonia) by using hydrogen from fossil fuels and green ammonia from the electrolyte by using the renewable electricity (Yara, 2023).
   
   
2. Focus on the woodland by working with key stakeholders and supporting the community in urban tree planting and new forest creation.
   
   
3. Publish the clean air strategy and legislate to limit air pollutant levels such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emitted by combustion plants (MCPs) and generators.
   
   
4. Select the existing indicators to measure the extent of achieving clean air by using the emissions of key pollutants, the number of polluted days, and vulnerable areas with excessive levels of air pollution.
   
   
5. Work with local authorities to encourage householders to cut down the burning of wood and coal and hope to end the sales of conventional petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040.
   
   

 
2.3 Germany

The German federal government proposed four pillars in their climate change adaptation plan (German Federal Cabinet, 2011), including (1) knowledge and information sharing; (2) adaptation framework setting; (3) measures explanation that is directly responsible for governments; and (4) active participation of the international climate initiatives and enhanced cooperation with international research. The specific climate change adaptation plans with respect to air quality management are summarized as follows:

1. Consider the climate change impacts on decision-making processes. Each individual should take precautions against the climate change impacts within their responsibility.
   
   
2. Improve the comprehensive, country-wide, cross-sectoral vulnerability assessment that helps to illustrate climatic or non-climate changes and their systematic relationship.
   
   
3. Build the appropriate framework condition for future potential adaptation measures to help develop and strengthen the ecological, technological, and social adaptive capacities.
   
   
4. Exam actors that need adaptation, take measures for them, and evaluate their success. Certain successful projects related to air quality management include Climate-Adapted New Build and Refurbishment Projects at Federal Estates and the Creation of climate-plastic forests under federal ownership.
   
   
5. Undertake activities to meet German’s international responsibility including cooperating with international organizations such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and European Union (EU).
   
   

 
2.4 Japan

The National Plan for Adaptation to the Impacts of Climate Change was proposed by Japan government in 2015, which aimed to minimize the climate change impacts and achieve a safe, secure, and sustainable society that can quickly recover from damage caused by climate change (Cabinet Decision, 2015). The basic approaches for climate change adaptation included (1) observation and monitoring; (2) projection and assessment; (3) adaptation measures’ consideration and implementation; and (4) management progress and the revision of the adaptation plan. Specific climate change adaptation plans with respect to air quality management can be summarized as follows:

1. Collect scientific evidence of climate change impacts on water pollution, air pollution, and vulnerable populations, and provide scientific knowledge, technology, and financial assistance for developing countries to develop their adaptation actions.
   
   
2. Take countermeasures such as reducing urban surface temperature, increasing the public space to vegetation and water, altering the urban structure, developing urban farming, and changing lifestyles to eliminate the effects of island heat on human health.
   
   
3. Introduce robot technology, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve device performance and reduce labor intensity and make use of the latest climate change prediction data to promote global environmental observation and monitoring.
   
   
4. Facilitate lifestyle transitions such as green curtains of plants, improvement of energy efficiency of the house, installation of energy-saving products, and evaluation of the validity of road technology.
   
   
5. Increase the teamwork awareness activities between the government and environmental educational institutes.
   
   

 
2.5 Australia

The Australian government issued national climate resilience and adaptation strategy in 2015, which illustrated how to manage the change climate risk (Australian Government, 2015). This strategy identified a series of principles to guide effective practice, resilience construction and considered fields for future review, consultation, and action as considering climate risk. The specific climate change adaptation plans with respect to air quality management can be summarized as follows:

1. Provide information and warning systems, engage the related healthy behaviors, make plans to respond to severe weather events, and help the elderly to adopt precautions to heatwaves.
   
   
2. Integrate climate change into standards, rating, planning, and decision-making to reduce the health risk of exposure to disasters and ensure the building stock, i.e., a concept to represent the total number of buildings in certain case study areas can be adapted to changing climate and further to improve the resilience of cities and the built environment by updating a range of relevant standards, rating schemes, and policies.
   
   
3. Provide investment in scientific activities, protection, and natural resource management to establish the adaptation ability of the ecosystem to climate change.
   
   
4. Improve institutional arrangements for sharing and other intelligent knowledge between protection participants and decision-makers. Furthermore, solve the climate risk and consider the disease related to the high temperature of the workplace.
   
   
5. Provide essential information on residential, commercial, industrial construction, public institutions, and infrastructure through the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS).
   
   

 
3 CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION PLAN: A PERSPECTIVE OF AIR QUALITY MANAGEMENT

To propose Climate Change Adaptation Plan concerning Air (CCAP-Air), it is essential to summarize successful measures and policies from mentioned countries. Table 2 shows relevant strategies suggested by countries as presented in our previous discussions. Five general strategies for current developed countries to adapt to climate change concerning air can be summarized as (1) incorporating the climate change impacts on air quality management and corresponding measure into laws, regulation (UK), guidelines (USA), standards (USA), frameworks (Germany, Australia) or policies (Germany); (2) facilitating research collaboration (USA, Germany, Japan) on the development of models (USA), tools, database, indicators (UK) or evaluation process (Germany) to identify the impact of climate change on air quality management and explore their interactions; (3) exploring the nature-based solutions (UK, Japan) to harness their ecological benefits to adapt to the impacts of climate change on air quality management; (4) integrating AIoT technology and smart monitoring and response systems such as national exposure information system (Australia), information and communication technologies (Japan) into climate change monitoring and governance; (5) promoting green finance (such as finance assistance for developing adaptation actions from Japan and investment provision in relevant scientific activities, protection, and natural resource management from Australia) to support green business development that addresses the impacts of climate change on the air quality management.

Currently, the barriers to taking measures for climate change adaptation should also be addressed. For the legal and regulatory aspects, the relevant standards, regulations, guidance, recommendations, policy, and laws concerning climate change adaptation still need to be comprehensive. For model and data uncertainty, many computationally inexpensive, easily adaptive, high accuracy of climate and air quality models have been developed to explore the impacts of climate change atmospheric mechanism of pollutants and ecosystem and collect evidence, which may still exist certain uncertainty but is greatly helpful for us to simulate the change in metrological variables under various climate change scenarios, predict their effects on atmosphere pollutant distributions and connect to the social indicators to support the government’s planning and decision for air pollutant reduction. Also, the diversity of input data (including the pollutants’ attributes, meteorological parameters, local conditions, spatial population distribution, economic information, and health impact functions) in climate and air quality models may increase high uncertainty such as errors in input data, model physical environment, and numerical representation (Chang and Hanna, 2004). Furthermore, the developed models are also easily questioned because of the “black box” effects of their inner mechanism and the rationality of the structure. For public acceptance, the responsive system and up-to-minute emergency information for overcoming heatwaves, and severe weather events are immature and the media and training courses used to raise public awareness are fewer. For technical and physical aspects, the database for helping climate change adaptation in the high-risk area is insufficient and the relationship between air quality, heat island effect, and public health is undeveloped. For the financial and institutional aspects, the investment and funding projects from the government or society for climate change adaptation are less and many challenges related to commercialization still exist (including cost, safety, and interactivity). Additionally, the lack of database related to the environment for refining criteria, and technical obstacles also exist to improve the economic transformation of enterprises.

This study proposed five key strategies to summarize plans from the above countries and overcome their corresponding barriers. The detailed description of each point is stated as follows:

 
Strategy 1: Integrate the Impacts of Climate Change on Air Quality into Legislation

Nowadays, people live in an age full of rules, which affect the whole aspect of our life and regulate our behaviors. One of the effective ways for governments to solve their environmental problems is to draft national regulations, directives, decisions, and recommendations for defining a boundary that people should not cross. Several famous legislations exploring the interaction between climate change and air quality has established. For example, the USA passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) in 1970, in which the National Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) are established to consider the impacts of climate change on air quality, and six types of air pollutants from various emission sources are regulated (U.S. EPA, 2022a, 2022b). In Europe, the United Kingdom first introduced the comprehensive air quality regulation management legislation namely Alkali Works Regulation Act in 1906. After that, the first legislation of the European Union (EU) on air protection was the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), in which the emissions from groups of air pollutants are limited (Kuklinska et al., 2015). Japan enacted the Pollution Countermeasures Act in 1970, to provide the obligation to governments to take measures for pollution prevention concerning air (Fujiwara, 2022).

Integrating the impacts of climate change on ozone effects, PM pollution, atmospheric deposition, extreme weather event, and indoor air quality into legislation is crucial for mainstreaming climate change adaptation and establishing a standard to manage air quality. The relevant regulators such as the national government, local municipalities, and courts should take responsibility for taking precautions against the impacts of climate change, to ensure the regulations are enforced smoothly. Nations’ ecological, technological, and social adaptive capacities will be developed and strengthened by building an appropriate framework to guide future potential adaptation measures.

 
Strategy 2: Develop Models to Simulate the Impacts of Climate Change on Air Quality

More advantages of computationally inexpensive, easily adaptive, high accuracy of climate and air quality models have made more scientists willing to utilize models to explore the impacts of climate change atmospheric mechanism of pollutants and ecosystem and collect evidence. The advanced computer models provide us with a great technological capacity to simulate the change in metrological variables under various climate change scenarios, predict their effects on atmosphere pollutant distributions and connect to the social indicators to support the government’s planning and decision making about air pollutant reduction. Recent studies have adopted relevant models to explore the impacts of climate change on air quality (Table 3), in which the comprehensive models including Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), Community Earth System Model (CESM), Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ), the Coupled Model version 3 (CM3), Intervention Model for Air Pollution Model (InMAP), Land Use Regression Model (LUR), BenMAP, and California Emissions Projection Analysis Model (CEPAM), Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), and Comprehensive Air Quality Model with extensions (CAMx) have been widely applied to analyze the interaction among meteorological variables, air quality, and public health. If solving the barriers to data uncertainty and model uncertainty by improving the accuracy, compliance, consistency, repeatability, timeliness, completeness of data and model performance (Chang and Hanna, 2004; DiRenzo et al., 2023) and the uniform guidelines for modeling uncertainty estimation (Borrego et al., 2008). In addition, developing modeling tools to simulate the diffusion mechanism of pollutants under meteoritical parameters and evaluating the health effects of human-caused by climate change would be greatly helpful for climate change adaptation.

 
Strategy 3: Incorporate Nature-based Solutions into Air Quality Management

With the increasing attention to ecosystem services, people began to think about using Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) like Green Infrastructure (GI) to mitigate air pollution, the heat island effect, and other air-related environmental issues (Gopalakrishnan et al., 2019; Tomson et al., 2021). NBS is defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as solutions to protect, manage, restore and modify ecosystems that address social challenges and provide benefits for well-being and biodiversity. Concerning the air pollution issue, the major patterns of GI to improve air quality and reduce heat island effects are changing airflow and pollution dispersion, depositing, and absorbing air pollutants, and reducing air temperature by shading and evapotranspiration (Hewitt et al., 2020). Past literature has tried to quantify the capacity of vegetation as widely applied GI including green roofs, vertical greening, trees, and hedges shown in Table 4 which indicates that GI can improve the air quality and temperature in the vicinity of traffic road (Abhijith and Kumar, 2020; Illarionova et al., 2020), building environment (Abhijith et al., 2017), and even the whole city (Bottalico et al., 2017; Jayasooriya et al., 2017; De Carvalho and Szlafsztein, 2019; Santamouris and Osmond, 2020; Tiwari and Kumar, 2020; Russo et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2022, 2023; Muresan et al., 2022). Moreover, the vegetation-based GI can provide great ecosystem service by increasing the public space to vegetation and water and develop urban farming, calling for people to change lifestyles to eliminate the effects of island heat on human health, making air quality management more biological and effective to achieve the air quality management more sustainable.

 
Strategy 4: Consider AIoT into Climate Change Monitoring and Governance

Past studies have tried incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into IoT to improve the accuracy of climate change monitoring, which emerges the definition of AIoT (Huang and Kuo, 2018). The AIoT is commonly used to monitor air pollutants concentration by combining the flow rate and the change in the electronic signal (Fig. 2). Saini et al. (2021) combined IoT with artificial intelligence to predict air quality in indoor environments, and the result was shown that the negative effects of air pollution on building occupants could be effectively avoided by integrating the IoT-based monitoring system and AI-based prediction model into indoor environments. Yang et al. (2021) viewed the PM monitoring methods that collected pollutants’ data by sensors and presented the application of AI and IoT (AIoT) to PM monitoring. Overall, AIoT helps climate change and air pollutants’ monitoring, prediction, planning, and adaptation, which can be used to improve weather and climate predictions. The satellite images, ocean currents, atmospheric composition changes, and other extensive data from the IoT can be processed by computers to predict global weather and climate models at different time scales (Chantry et al., 2021). Additionally, AIoT is used for creating smarter and more sophisticated digital technology, climate monitoring systems, and early warning systems, which minimize all types of losses as an important project of air quality management. The AIoT can be a powerful automation tool that connects objects through various communication protocols and networks to achieve information interaction, governance, and real-time monitoring.

Fig. 2. The structure of AIoT for climate change monitoring and governance. 

 
Strategy 5: Establish the Green Finance System for Technologies of Climate Change

Green finance is the financial services provided to support the economic activities of environmental improvement, climate change, and efficient use of resources (G20 Green Finance Study Group, 2016). Using tools like green standard, green bond, green bank, green index, green insurance, and carbon trading to promote the process of green finance in various areas (Table 5) helps accelerate the development of national green financial standards, protect biological resources such as agriculture, forestry, and fisheries from the impacts on extreme climate events, promote companies actively shift to low-carbon types in the Green, Social and Sustainable development bond market (GSS), adjust monetary policies and financial prevention mechanisms by central banks and businesses, and ease the flow of credit, rebuild the infrastructure after climate disasters (Sachs et al., 2019; Kemfert et al., 2020). Effective financial assistance for climate-related scientific activities, protection, and natural resource management plays a vital role in enhancing the adaptation capacity toward climate change.

 
4 CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVE

In this study, a climate change adaptation plan concerning air (CCAP-Air) has been proposed based on the overview of the relevant policies and strategies between major developed countries, where five main strategies, i.e., integrating the impacts of climate change on air quality into legislation, developing models to simulate the impacts of climate change on air quality, incorporating nature-based solutions into air quality management, considering AIoT into climate change monitoring and governance, and establishing the green finance system for technologies of climate change are suggested.

The above five strategies should complement each other based on the development of state-of-technology regarding the impacts of climate change on air quality. For instance, it needs to develop models and technologies to identify and assess the impacts of climate change on air quality which can provide scientific information for government to make cost-affection solutions. In addition, the impacts of climate change on air quality should introduce into the national policy and regulation thereby forming an integrated and comprehensive institutional framework and directing guidance for climate change adaptation activities. Using NBS to develop GI, engineers are required to learn principles and applications on ecological environment, ecosystem service, landscape planning and ecological practice engineer for climate chang adaptation. AIoT-based technologies including cyber-physical system (CPS) and digital twins should be incorporated with CCAP-Air to monitor the adaptability of NBS to the impacts of climate change on air quality, establish the pre-warning system for prevention of nature disaster events, as well optimize the post-event planning. Most importantly, the foundation of the entire CCAP-Air needs to obtain financial support including the salary of human resources, the investment of scientific research, the cost of NBS construction, as well as the design and operation of AIoT-based systems.

It was thus concluded that to implement the CCAP-Air successfully into the climate change adaptation plan, several barriers including institution, regulation, technology, finance and public acceptance should be overcome.