Ozone pollution mitigation under China’s ‘Dual-Carbon’ scenario over the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

As greenhouse gases and air pollutants are often co-emitted, the co-benefits on air quality improvement arising from implementing low-carbon policies are drawing much attention. Here we focus our research on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in south-eastern China, the demonstration zone for air pollution prevention and control initiatives of China, while still contending with severe ozone pollution, particularly in autumn. This study assesses whether China’s ‘Dual-Carbon’ targets contribute to the GBA achieving the national ozone control goals and offers corresponding mitigation strategies. We developed an external module to softly couple an integrated assessment model IMEDCGE (Integrated Model of Energy, Environment, and Economy for Sustainable Development, Computable General Equilibrium) with the WRF-Chem atmospheric chemistry transport model. The fusion allows us to project the regional ozone pollution evolutions from the base year (2015) to 2050 under various future scenarios. We explore three anthropogenic emission reduction pathways, each reflecting different levels in climate change mitigation targets and end-of-pipe control policies, resulting in varied ozone precursor reduction patterns. The results show that implementing China’s ‘Dual-Carbon’ policies, combined with stringent end-of-pipe control measures, will substantially decrease the averaged MDA8 surface ozone across the GBA to below 90 μg m-3 by 2050. However, different ozone concentration trends emerge between the southern and northern regions due to spatial variations in ozone chemical regimes, as indicated by H2O2/HNO3 ratios. Overall, NOx emission reduction will become increasingly effective in curbing ozone pollution till 2050, while NMVOCs emission reduction, driven by strict end-of-pipe control policies, plays a pivotal role in the short term (before 2030). Even under the most ideal scenario, where more than 90% of local anthropogenic NOx and 85% of NMVOCs emissions are eliminated, our findings underscore the imperative of coordinated efforts across all sectors and collaborative emission reduction beyond the GBA to mitigate ozone pollution effectively.