Effects of Climate Change on Air Pollution Impacts and Response Strategies for European Ecosystems (Éclaire)

The ÉCLAIRE project investigated the ways in which climate change alters the threat of air pollution on European land ecosystems including soils. Based on field observations, experimental data and models, the project established new flux, concentration and dose-response relationships, as a basis to inform future European policies.

ÉCLAIRE quantified how global warming and altered precipitation can affect emissions of key European primary pollutants (NOx, NH3, VOCs), including interactions with increasing aerosol and hemispheric O3 background concentrations, modifying atmospheric transport and deposition. An ensemble of chemistry transport models was applied in order to assess uncertainty in response to harmonized scenarios for climate, emissions and land-use, while high resolution studies investigated how climate change can alter local patterns of pollutant exposure and threshold exceedance.

Taking advantage of a new biodiversity-related indicator, impacts of air pollution under different future scenarios have been assessed. An ECLAIRE optimization scenario allowed to demonstrate that health-related measures on air pollution can have considerable advantages for biodiversity protection.