Will it be more difficult to breathe because of global warming caused by harmful plants?

There air quality It is an important aspect of human life and, moreover, it is a key factor among sustainable development goals related to good health and the welfare. In this sense, it is expected that approximately two-thirds of pollution the future of air will come from plantssince they all produce chemical products calls biogenic volatile organic compounds oh BVOC.

By themselves, BVOCs are benign. However, once they react with the oxygenproduce organic spray and, if inhaled, may cause childhood asthma and increase the mortality in children, as well as the promotion heart disease y lung cancer in the adults.

These fine particles – called PM2.5 by their diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less – on the surface they form a carcinogen associated with a global excess mortality of 8.8 million people per year, including 5.5 million due to anthropogenic sources and 3.3 by sources natural. This indicates that air pollution is not entirely man-made.

In this tone, when the global temperatures increase by 4°C, the harmful emissions plants and dust will also increase by up to 14%, according to a new study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment and carried out by a work team from the University of Riverside (UCR). The work did not take into account a simultaneous increase in man-made sources of air pollution, which has already been predicted by other studies.

“We don’t look at human emissions of air pollution, because we can change what we emit. We can replace the fleet with electric cars, for example, but that may not change air pollution from plants or dust. The smell of a freshly cut lawn or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry are BVOCs. Plants emit it constantly,” said James Gómez, a UCR doctoral student and lead author of the study.

There are two reasons why plants increase the production of BVOCs: increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and increased temperatures. Both of these factors are expected to continue to increase. Growing plants is a net benefit to the environment, as it reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps control global warming.

Small yard BVOCs will not harm people. “Your lawn, for example, won’t produce enough BVOC to make you sick,” Gomez said. It is the large-scale increase in carbon dioxide that contributes to the increase in BVOCs in the biosphere, and then organic aerosols.”

The second biggest contributor to future air pollution is probably dust from the Sahara Desert. “In our models, increased winds should blow more dust into the atmosphere,” said Robert Allen, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCR and co-author of the study.

As the climate warms, dust from the Sahara is likely to increase worldwide, with higher levels in Africa, the eastern United States and the Caribbean. These indicators are expected especially for North Africa, including the Sahel and the Sahara, due to the more intense monsoons in the western part of the continent. Organic aerosols and dust, along with sea salt, carbon and sulphates, belong to the category of air pollutants.

The increase in PM2.5 pollution of natural origin has increased, according to the data of the study in question, in direct proportion to the levels of CO2″. The more CO2 increases, the more PM2 there is, 5 released into the atmosphere, and more opposite This is also true. The more we reduce, the better the air quality,” Gómez added. For example, if the climate warms by just 2°C, the paper found a 7% increase in PM2.5.

All of these results apply only to the changes seen in air quality over land, as the study focuses on human health impacts. The researchers hope that the potential for improvement in this indicator will inspire quick and decisive action to reduce CO2 emissions. Without it, temperatures could rise by 4°C by the end of this century, although it could happen sooner.

Gómez warned that CO2 emissions will have to drop significantly to have a positive effect on air quality in the future. “The results of this experiment may even be a bit conservative because we did not take into account climate-related changes in emissions from wildfires,” Gómez concluded. Steven T Turnock, Larry W. Horowitz, Kostas Tsigaridis, Susanne E. Bauer, Dirk Olivie, Erik S. Thomson and Pablo Ginoux also participated in this research.

Continue reading: